3D building reconstruction from ALS data using unambiguous decomposition into elementary structures

The objective of the paper is to develop an automated method that enables for the recognition and semantic interpretation of topological building structures. The novelty of the proposed modeling approach is an unambiguous decomposition of complex objects into predefined simple parametric structures, resulting in the reconstruction of one topological unit without independent overlapping elements. The aim of a data processing chain is to generate complete polyhedral models at LOD2 with an explicit topological structure and semantic information. The algorithms are performed on 3D point clouds acquired by airborne laser scanning. The presented methodology combines data-based information reflected in an attributed roof topology graph with common knowledge about buildings stored in a library of elementary structures. In order to achieve an appropriate balance between reconstruction precision and visualization aspects, the implemented library contains a set of structure-depended soft modeling rules instead of strictly defined geometric primitives. The proposed modeling algorithm starts with roof plane extraction performed by the segmentation of building point clouds, followed by topology identification and recognition of predefined structures. We evaluate the performance of the novel procedure by the analysis of the modeling accuracy and the degree of modeling detail. The assessment according to the validation methods standardized by the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing shows that the completeness of the algorithm is above 80%, whereas the correctness exceeds 98%.