AUTOMATIC GENERATION OF BUILDING FOOTPRINTS FROM AIRBORNE LIDAR DATA

Airborne LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology has reached a degree of the required accuracy in mapping professions, and advanced LIDAR systems are becoming increasingly common in the various fields of application. LiDAR data constitute an excellent source of information for reconstructing the Earth's surface due to capability of rapid and dense 3D spatial data acquisition with high accuracy. However, organizing the LIDAR data and extracting information from the data are difficult tasks because LIDAR data are composed of randomly distributed point clouds and do not provide sufficient semantic information. The main reason for this difficulty in processing LIDAR data is that the data provide only irregularly spaced point coordinates without topological and relational information among the points. This study introduces an efficient and robust method for automatic extraction of building footprints using airborne LIDAR data. The proposed method separates ground and non-ground data based on the histogram analysis and then rearranges the building boundary points using convex hull algorithm to extract building footprints. The method was implemented to LIDAR data of the heavily built-up area. Experimental results showed the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed method for automatic producing building layers of the large scale digital maps and 3D building reconstruction.