3D LoD2 modelling of Halong City based on UAV point cloud

3D urban building models are crucial for linking, converging, and integrating economic and social urban data. They are extensively utilized in numerous domains such as smart city development, comprehensive social management, and emergency decision-making. Advanced technologies like affordable UAV (Unmanned Aerial Systems) imagery enable a greater level of automation in data acquisition compared to traditional digital photogrammetry methods. The main objective of this research is to build a 3D LoD2 CityGML model with dense point clouds from UAV images. This study presents a completed workflow for generating 3D CityGML models of the city at LoD2 using UAV data. The use of dense point cloud data from UAV technology in the experimental area has been performed using a DJI Phantom 4 Pro. The original point clouds should be denoised using the statistical outlier remover (SOR), the main goal is to reduce noise while preserving the building's geometry. After that, the point clouds of object features were vectored for the level of detail 2 (LoD2) of the object's 3D volume corresponding to its actual height, and objects belonging to the Feature Class 3D layer will represent LoD2 on SketchUp Pro 2021 software to generate a highly accurate 3D model. The evaluation results show that the square errors calculated from the test points for the three axes X, Y, Z are 1.4 cm, 1.6 cm, 1.7 cm, respectively. Conducting research to choose the UAV photography method aims to offer an efficient and cost-effective solution, saving time and human resources, to address the 3D mapping challenges in urban areas across Vietnam.