Slice-based building facade reconstruction from 3D point clouds

We propose a comprehensive strategy to reconstruct urban building geometry from three-dimensional (3D) point clouds. First, the point clouds are segmented using a rough-detail segmentation algorithm, and refinements guided by topological relationships are performed to rectify the segmentation mistakes. Then, the semantic features (such as facades and windows) that belong to the buildings are recognized and extracted. Next, each facade is cut into a sequence of slices. The initial models are recovered by sequentially detecting and connecting the anchor points. Finally, due to the regular arrangements of windows, a template-matching method relying on the similarity and repetitiveness of the windows is proposed to recover the details on building facades. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can automatically reconstruct the building geometry and detailed window structures are better depicted.