ENG 4000: Engineering project ZE Modeller: The LIDAR Point Cloud Processor Preliminary Design Review

Light detection and ranging (LIDAR) instruments collect high density and accurate 3D point clouds of scanned surfaces of objects. For the applications of building reconstruction from ground based LIDAR, the most fundamental spatial information to be extracted are plane features. ZE Modeller implements a point cloud registration and geo-referencing alogithm. Further, ZE Modeller also offers an automatic method to extract plane features from LIDAR point cloud data. The software using a three-dimensional splitting and merging algorithm based on an octree data structure. In the splitting procedure, the point cloud is recursively divided into the octree sub-space until in each octree sub-space contains points closely fitting a 3D plane. In the merging procedure, neighbouring octree subspaces will be merged if the contained points closely fit the same plane.