3D Building Reconstruction and Visualization by Clustering Airborne LiDAR Data and Roof Shape Analysis

Segmentation and organization of the LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) data of the Earth's surface are difficult tasks because the captured LiDAR data are composed of irregularly distributed point clouds with lack of semantic information. The reason for this difficulty in processing LiDAR data is that the data provide huge amount of the spatial coordinates without topological and/or relational information among the points. This study introduces LiDAR data segmentation technique by utilizing histograms of the LiDAR height image data and analyzing roof shape for 3D reconstruction and visualization of the buildings. One of the advantages in utilizing LiDAR height image data is no registration required because the LiDAR data are geo-referenced and ortho-projected data. In consequence, measurements on the image provide absolute reference coordinates. The LiDAR image allows measurement of the initial building boundaries to estimate locations of the side walls and to form the planar surfaces which represent approximate building footprints. LiDAR points close to each side wall were grouped together then the least-square planar surface fitting with the segmented point clouds was performed to determine precise location of each wall of an building. Finally, roof shape analysis was performed by accumulated slopes along the profiles of the roof top. However, simulated LiDAR data were used for analyzing roof shape because buildings with various shapes of the roof do not exist in the test area. The proposed approach has been tested on the heavily built-up urban residential area. 3D digital vector map produced by digitizing complied aerial photographs was used to evaluate accuracy of the results. Experimental results show efficiency of the proposed methodology for 3D building reconstruction and large scale digital mapping especially for the urban area.