3D BUILDING MODEL RECONSTRUCTION FROM POINT CLOUDS AND GROUND PLANS

TLDR

Airborne laser altimetry, producing high‑density point clouds, is widely used to generate digital elevation models and supports many other applications. This study aims to build 3‑D urban building models from point clouds and ground plans. The authors extract planar faces with a 3‑D Hough transform, then apply two reconstruction strategies—one using intersection lines and height‑jump edges, the other treating all detected planes as building parts—guided by available ground plans. The second strategy reconstructs more buildings and finer details, achieving 83 of 94 buildings for rectangular ground‑plan segments, though it sometimes introduces extraneous geometry.

Abstract

Airborne laser altimetry has become a very popular technique for the acquisition of digital elevation models. The high point density that can be achieved with this technique enables applications of laser data for many other purposes. This paper deals with the construction of 3D models of the urban environment. A three-dimensional version o f the well-known Hough transform is used for the e xtraction o f planar faces from the irregularly distributed point clouds. To support the 3D reconstruction usage is made of available ground plans of the buildings. Two different strategies are explored to reconstruct building models from the detected planar faces and segmented ground plans. Whereas the first strategy tries to detect intersection lines and height jump edges, the second one assumes that all detected planar faces should model some part of the building. Experiments show that the second strategy is able to reconstruct more buildings and more details of this buildings, but that it sometimes leads to additional parts of the model that do not exist. When restricted to buildings with rectangular segments of the ground plan, the second strategy was able to reconstruct 83 buildings out of a dataset with 94 buildings.