Identifying Building Types and Building Clusters Using 3d-laser Scanning and Gis-data

Power authorities are highly interested in figures that indicate the energy requirements and especially the heat requirements on a local, regional and country-wide level. Such numbers are needed for their planning of new sites of power plants or for planning alternative energy modes. Existing methods for estimating those requirements heavily rely on local sampling methods as well as on the use of statistical estimates and models. The traditional way of acquiring area wide data is to use statistics and punctually acquired data and extrapolate it to wider areas. E.g. several districts of a city are investigated based on aerial photos and classified into different building and settlement typologies; the cities, in turn are classified according to certain types, which in the end will lead to a country wide statistics. In order to determine more accurate base information, in this project we are using laser scanning as a basic data acquisition method to determine building volumes, i.e. the volumes to be heated. This is due to the fact that laser scanning potentially allows for an areawide data capture, and also has a high potential of automated data analysis and interpretation. The heat demand of an individual building depends primarily on its age and its type. Therefore, in order to assign head demands to individual buildings measured from laser scanning, the building type first has to be inferred from the available geometric characteristics. The paper will present the results of the automatic extraction of building volumes, and concentrates on the identification of the given building and settlement types that can be used to link the building volumes with specific heat coefficients. The results achieved with our approach will be compared with results derived in the traditional way.