Fusion of ALS point cloud and optical imagery for 3D reconstruction of building's roof

Abstract

Three-dimensional building models are important in various applications such as disaster management and urban planning. In this paper a method based on fusion of LiDAR point cloud and aerial image data sources has been proposed. Firstly using 2D map, the point set relevant to each building separated from the overall LiDAR point cloud. In the next step, the mean shift clustering algorithm applied to the points of different buildings in the feature space. Finally the segmentation stage ended with the separation of parallel and coplanar segments. Then using the adjacency matrix, adjacent segments are intersected and inner vertices are determined. In the other space, the area of any building cropped in the image space and the mean shift algorithm applied to it. Then, the lines of roof's outline edge extracted by the Hough transform algorithm and the points obtained from the intersection of these lines transformed to the ground space. Finally, by integration of structural points of intersected adjacent facets and the transformed points from image space, reconstruction performed. In order to evaluate the efficiency of proposed method, buildings with different shapes and different level of complexity selected and the results of the 3D model reconstruction evaluated. The results showed credible efficiency of method for different buildings.