Estimating building floor plans from exterior using laser scanners

The knowledge of the interior structure of buildings is important in many civilian and military applications. While it is possible to obtain interior maps by exhaustively inspecting every room in a building, in many situations this is infeasible due to security or safety reasons. In this paper, we develop a method to generate interior building floor plans from the exterior of the structure. We use a laser scanner to measure the range of hundreds of thousands of points on interior walls of the building, exploiting the fact that the laser can go through unobstructed windows. We develop an algorithm to fit planes to the point cloud resulting from the laser data. To accomplish this, the optimal locations of horizontal planes are found such that they model the ceiling and the floors; subsequently, vertical planes are placed perpendicular to those and aligned to fit the data. Once these planes are found and localized, floor plans for each floor are extracted. We show that our proposed method is effective in recovering partial floor plans for three separate building examples.