Novel Half-Spaces Based 3D Building Reconstruction Using Airborne LiDAR Data

Automatic building reconstruction from laser-scanned data remains a challenging research topic due to buildings’ roof complexity and sparse data. A novel automatic building reconstruction methodology, based on half-spaces and a height jump analysis, is presented in this paper. The proposed methodology is performed in three stages. During the preprocessing stage, the classified input point cloud is clustered by position to obtain building point sets, which are then evaluated to obtain half-spaces and detect height jumps. Half-spaces represent the fundamental shape for generating building models, and their definition is obtained from the corresponding segment of points that describe an individual planar surface. The detection of height jumps is based on a DBSCAN search within a custom search space. During the second stage, the building point sets are divided into sub-buildings in such a way that their roofs do not contain height jumps. The concept of sub-buildings without height jumps is introduced to break down the complex building models with height jumps into smaller parts, where shaping with half-spaces can be applied accurately. Finally, the sub-buildings are reconstructed separately with the corresponding half-spaces and then joined back together to form a complete building model. In the experiments, the methodology’s performance was demonstrated on a large scale and validated on an ISPRS benchmark dataset, where an RMSE of 0.29 m was obtained in terms of the height difference.