Industrial building rehabilitation is one the latest trends within the field of sustainable development. However, these interventions often disregard the issue of user comfort, despite being the most important factor of energy efficiency. This work deals with the assessment of the indoor thermal conditions of a restored industrial building, considering not only air temperature but also mean rad...

The ‘wind-rain’ house has a courtyard with glazed roof, which allows more direct sunlight to come into indoor spaces during the winter. The glazed roof can be partially opened or closed and automatically controlled to provide natural ventilation in order to adjust for indoor thermal conditions and the roof area can be shaded by reflective insulation materials during the summer. Two field studie...

This paper presents a new segmentation technique for LIDAR point cloud data for automatic extraction of building roof planes. Using the ground height from a DEM (Digital Elevation Model), the raw LIDAR points are separated into two groups: ground and nonground points. The ground points are used to generate a ‘building mask’ in which the black areas represent the ground where there are no laser ...

This work presents a combined bottom-up and top-down approach to extraction and refinement of building footprints from airborne LIDAR data. Building footprints are interesting for many applications in urban planning. The cadastral maps, however, may be limited for certain areas or not be updated frequently. Airborne laser scanning data is therefore considered by many people in the last decade a...

A Semi-Automatic Building Extraction system using two or more digitized overlapping aerial images has been enhanced by increased automation for the measurement of saddle-back-roof buildings, hip-roof buildings and boxes. All newly developed modules have been incorporated in the object oriented design of the system. The new methods consist of a ground-point and roof-top matching tool and a robus...

This paper describes an improved version of our system for robust detection of buildings with a gable roof in varying rural areas from very-high-resolution aerial images. The algorithm follows a custom-made design, extracting key features close to modeling, such as roof ridges and gutters, in order to allow a large freedom in roof appearances. It starts by detecting straight line-segments as ro...

Green roof assemblies influence the total roof surface energy balance for a building. The energy balance for a green roof depends mostly on the selection of plants and substrates suitable for the building’s location. This study measured thermal properties of common green roof materials and selected two types of plants and substrates to simulate transient thermal performance of different green r...

The drainage of low-sloped roof systems involves multiple design professionals, and often each has a different opinion as to their design responsibility. Roofing issues have been identified as being a number one source of litigation, and rain-induced roof collapses continue to occur with alarming frequency. With the backdrop of several rain-induced roof collapses, this paper illustrates the com...

The objective of this paper is to show that the visualization of an urban landscape by 3D computer graphics can be used as indicators of human habitats on a worldwide basis when we think of a sustainable world in future. In the 1900s, in Japan, 2D digital urban maps became popular as commercial products such as automobile navigation map with GPS. They adopted the traditional map making techniqu...

Accurate 3D surface models in urban areas are essential for a variety of applications, such as visualization, GIS, and mobile communications. Since manual surface reconstruction is very costly and time consuming, the development of automated algorithms is of great importance. On the other hand LIDAR data is a relatively new technology for obtaining Digital Surface Models (DSM) of the earth’s su...