TopoLAP: Topology recovery for building reconstruction by deducing the relationships between linear and planar primitives

Abstract

Limited by the noise, missing data and varying sampling density of the point clouds, planar primitives are prone to be lost during plane segmentation, leading to topology errors when reconstructing complex building models. In this paper, a pipeline to recover the broken topology of planar primitives (TopoLAP) is proposed to reconstruct level of details 3 (LoD3) models. Firstly, planar primitives are segmented from the incomplete point clouds and feature lines are detected both from point clouds and images. Secondly, the structural contours of each plane segment are reconstructed by subset selection from intersections of these feature lines. Subsequently, missing planes are recovered by plane deduction according to the relationships between linear and planar primitives. Finally, the manifold and watertight polyhedral building models are reconstructed based on the optimized PolyFit framework. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed pipeline can handle partial incomplete point clouds and reconstruct the LoD3 models of complex buildings automatically. A comparative analysis indicates that the proposed method performs better to preserve sharp edges and achieves a higher fitness and correction rate than rooftop-based modeling and the original PolyFit algorithm.