Analysis of the Solar Potential of Roofs by Using Official Lidar Data

This paper focuses on a field test that locates roof areas with a high solar potential and predicts the solar “harvest” per m. The test analyzes 2.5D LIDAR data provided by official surveying and mapping sources. The primary LIDAR data is prepared by masking the roofs’ contours and afterwards filtering the point cloud by a threshold value. The remaining LIDAR data, which represents the buildings’ roofs, is analyzed according to the slope, the azimuthal exposition and shaded roof areas. The quality assessment of the derived roof areas is carried out by means of a 3D dataset which is semiautomatically acquired from panchromatic stereophotogrammetric aerial photographs.