Generating Building Outlines from Terrestrial Laser Scanning

Terrestrial laser scanned point cloud is a valuable data source for automatic building reconstruction. Detailed building facade structures from wall, roof, extrusion etc., can be recovered from the explicit three dimensional coordinates in the laser points. This paper presents our approach which generates building outlines semi-automatically from recognized building features. First, concave polygon outline are fitted from each feature segment directly; then outlines of occluded parts are generated from knowledge based assumptions; then the outline edges, where different features intersect, are corrected with plane intersecting; and finally different outlines are combined to make a solid polyhedron building model. The method is tested with a terrestrial laser point cloud of an urban area. Promising result models are acquired from this method.