How does Google StreetView recognize 3D planes?

Question

Inside Google Street View, moving the mouse around over different buildings and stuff, it highlights the 3D plane in which that surface of the building is located.

How does it recognize this thing? Is it done automatically by machine algorithms, or manually in the preprocessing?

Answer 1

Read this to get your answer. What Google does is it gets a panoramic view by stitching multiple images together, and then the device measures the relative distance of every object around it (through lasers), and constructs a 3D model of the surroundings based on that.