Abstract: Aiming to deal with the problem that manual extraction of contours of buildings on oblique view maps are expensive and ineffective with low accuracy and coarse detail, we present a method of automatic extraction of contours buildings on oblique view maps which based on 3D city models. We employ depth-buffers to obtain a building object's color-buffers concerning the occlusion blocked by other buildings and the existence of groups of buildings, and then we trace building contours based on color-buffers. And in order to keep the occlusion consistency and match the traced contours with the map, we propose loading 3D city models by block on projection plane. Finally, the validity and feasibility of this method are proved through the experiments on 3D city models of Wuhan.

Key words: building contours, 3D city models, oblique view maps, depth buffer, color buffer