The extraction of architectural structural line features can simplify the 3D spatial representation of built environments, reduce the storage and processing burden of large-scale point clouds, and provide essential geometric primitives for downstream modeling tasks. However, existing 3D line extraction methods suffer from incomplete and fragmented contours, with missing or misaligned intersections. To overcome these limitations, this study proposes a patch-level framework for 3D line extraction and structural optimization from building point clouds. The proposed method first partitions point clouds into planar patches and establishes local image planes for each patch, enabling a structured 2D representation of unstructured 3D data. Then, graph-cut segmentation is proposed to extract compact boundary contours, which are vectorized into closed lines and back-projected into 3D space to form the initial line segments. To improve geometric consistency, regularized geometric constraints, including adjacency, collinearity, and orthogonality constraints, are further designed to merge homogeneous segments, refine topology, and strengthen structural outlines. Finally, we evaluated the approach on three indoor building environments and four outdoor scenes, and experimental results show that it reduces noise and redundancy while significantly improving the completeness, closure, and alignment of 3D line features in various complex architectural structures.
Zhai et al. (2025) studied this question.