  Line clouds, though under-investigated in the previous work, potentially
encode more compact structural information of buildings than point clouds
extracted from multi-view images. In this work, we propose the first network to
process line clouds for building wireframe abstraction. The network takes a
line cloud as input , i.e., a nonstructural and unordered set of 3D line
segments extracted from multi-view images, and outputs a 3D wireframe of the
underlying building, which consists of a sparse set of 3D junctions connected
by line segments. We observe that a line patch, i.e., a group of neighboring
line segments, encodes sufficient contour information to predict the existence
and even the 3D position of a potential junction, as well as the likelihood of
connectivity between two query junctions. We therefore introduce a two-layer
Line-Patch Transformer to extract junctions and connectivities from sampled
line patches to form a 3D building wireframe model. We also introduce a
synthetic dataset of multi-view images with ground-truth 3D wireframe. We
extensively justify that our reconstructed 3D wireframe models significantly
improve upon multiple baseline building reconstruction methods. The code and
data can be found at https://github.com/Luo1Cheng/LC2WF.
