Automatic Extraction and Regularization of Building Outlines from Airborne Lidar Point Clouds

Building outlines are needed for various applications like urban planning, 3D city modelling and updating cadaster. Their automatic reconstruction, e.g. from airborne laser scanning data, as regularized shapes is therefore of high relevance. Today’s airborne laser scanning technology can produce dense 3D point clouds with high accuracy, which makes it an eligible data source to reconstruct 2D building outlines or even 3D building models. In this paper, we propose an automatic building outline extraction and regularization method that implements a trade-off between enforcing strict shape restriction and allowing flexible angles using an energy minimization approach. The proposed procedure can be summarized for each building as follows: (1) an initial building outline is created from a given set of building points with the alpha shape algorithm; (2) a Hough transform is used to determine the main directions of the building and to extract line segments which are oriented accordingly; (3) the alpha shape boundary points are then repositioned to both follow these segments, but also to respect their original location, favoring long line segments and certain angles. The energy function that guides this trade-off is evaluated with the Viterbi algorithm.