3d Building Model Reconstruction from Point Clouds and Ground Plans

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 of the well-known Hough transform is used for the extraction of 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.