Despite the large number of studies conducted during the last three decades concerning 3D building modelling starting from Lidar data, two persistent problems still exist. The first one is the absence of some roof details which will not only disappear in the building roof model due to their small areas regarding the point density, but are also considered as undesirable noise among the modelling procedures. The second problem consists in that the involved segmentation algorithms do not perform well in the presence of noise in the building point cloud data. These two problems generate undesirable deformation in the final 3D building model. This paper proposes a new automatic approach for detecting and modelling the missing roof details in addition to improving the building roof segments. In this context, the error map matrix, which presents the deviations of points to their fitting planes, is considered. Moreover, this matrix is analyzed in order to deduce the mask of missing roof details. At this stage, a new numeric factor is defined for estimating the roof segmentation accuracy in addition to the validity of the roof segmentation result. Then, the building point cloud is enhanced in order to decrease the negative noise influence and, consequently, to improve the building roof segments. Finally, the functionality and the accuracy of the proposed approach are tested and discussed.

Existing approaches that extract buildings from point cloud data do not select the appropriate neighbourhood for estimation of normals on individual points. However, the success of these approaches depends on correct estimation of the normal vector. In most cases, a fixed neighbourhood is selected without considering the geometric structure of the object and the distribution of the input point cloud. Thus, considering the object structure and the heterogeneous distribution of the point cloud, this paper proposes a new effective approach for selecting a minimal neighbourhood, which can vary for each input point. For each point, a minimal number of neighbouring points are iteratively selected. At each iteration, based on the calculated standard deviation from a fitted 3D line to the selected points, a decision is made adaptively about the neighbourhood. The selected minimal neighbouring points make the calculation of the normal vector accurate. The direction of the normal vector is then used to calculate the inside fold feature points. In addition, the Euclidean distance from a point to the calculated mean of its neighbouring points is used to make a decision about the boundary point. In the context of the accuracy evaluation, the experimental results confirm the competitive performance of the proposed approach of neighbourhood selection over the state-of-the-art methods. Based on our generated ground truth data, the proposed fold and boundary point extraction techniques show more than 90% F1-scores.

This paper studies the fidelity level of the extracted Lidar (LIght Detection And Ranging) building point cloud in relation to the original building.In this context, the building point cloud is compared with a reference model. This comparison allows a deep understanding of the point cloud structure with respect to both the actual building and the constructed model. Consequently, the source of the incompatibility in a (reference or constructed) building model is determined and described. Thus, this study considers four aspects of the building point cloud.First, the errors of building point cloud extraction and the undesirable points are quantified. Hence, it is found that the percentages of undesirable points are sometimes considerable (between 15% and 70%). Second, the evaluation of the fit of the altimetry with the reference model shows that the roof plane equations calculated from Lidar data can be more precise than those of reference model, Third, it is noted that the segmentability level between different point densities and building typologies are variable. Finally, the per plane comparison mentions the incompatibility of the plane boundaries of point cloud with reference model. Moreover, considerable differences are noted between the theoretical and the true point densities.

This paper suggests a new algorithm for automatic building point cloud filtering based on the Z coordinate histogram. This operation aims to select the roof class points from the building point cloud, and the suggested algorithm considers the general case where high trees are associated with the building roof. The Z coordinate histogram is analyzed in order to divide the building point cloud into three zones: the surrounding terrain and low vegetation, the facades, and the tree crowns and/or the roof points. This operation allows the elimination of the first two classes which represent an obstacle toward distinguishing between the roof and the tree points. The analysis of the normal vectors, in addition to the change of curvature factor of the roof class leads to recognizing the high tree crown points. The suggested approach was tested on five datasets with different point densities and urban typology. Regarding the results’ accuracy quantification, the average values of the correctness, the completeness, and the quality indices are used. Their values are, respectively, equal to 97.9%, 97.6%, and 95.6%. These results confirm the high efficacy of the suggested approach.

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Despite the large quantity of researches and publications achieved during the last three decades about 3D building modelling by using Lidar data, the question of inner roof plane boundaries modelling needs to be more extracted in detail. This paper focuses on detection and 2D modelling of building inner roof plane boundaries. This operation presents an imperative junction between roof planes detection and 3D building model generation. Therefore, it presents key procedure in data driven approaches. For achieving this purpose, roof boundaries are classified in four categories: outer building boundaries, inner roof plane boundaries, roof details (chimneys and windows) boundaries and boundaries related to non-detectable roof details. This paper concentrates on detection and modelling of inner roof plane boundaries and roof details (chimneys and windows) boundaries. Moreover, it details the modelling procedures step by step that is envisaged rarely in the literature. The proposed approach starts by analysing the adjacency relationship between roof planes. Then, the inner roof plane boundaries are detected. Finally, the junction relationships between boundaries are analysed before detecting the roof vertices. Once the 2D roof model is calculated, the visual deformations in addition to modelling accuracy are discussed.</p>

This paper presents an innovative approach to the automatic modeling of buildings composed of rotational surfaces, based exclusively on airborne LiDAR point clouds. The proposed approach starts by detecting the gravity center of the building's footprint. A thin point slice parallel to one coordinate axis around the gravity center was considered, and a vertical cross-section was rotated around a vertical axis passing through the gravity center, to generate the 3D building model. The constructed model was visualized with a matrix composed of three matrices, where the same dimensions represented the X, Y, and Z Euclidean coordinates. Five tower point clouds were used to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. Then, to estimate the accuracy, the point cloud was superimposed onto the constructed model, and the deviation of points describing the building model was calculated, in addition to the standard deviation. The obtained standard deviation values, which express the accuracy, were determined in the range of 0.21 m to 1.41 m. These values indicate that the accuracy of the suggested method is consistent with approaches suggested previously in the literature. In the future, the obtained model could be enhanced with the use of points that have considerable deviations. The applied matrix not only facilitates the modeling of buildings with various levels of architectural complexity, but it also allows for local enhancement of the constructed models.

This article suggests a new approach to automatic building footprint modeling using exclusively airborne LiDAR data. The first part of the suggested approach is the filtering of the building point cloud using the bias of the Z‐coordinate histogram. This operation aims to detect the points of roof class from the building point cloud. Hence, eight rules for histogram interpretation are suggested. The second part of the suggested approach is the roof modeling algorithm. It starts by detecting the roof planes and calculating their adjacency matrix. Hence, the roof plane boundaries are classified into four categories: (1) outer boundary; (2) inner plane boundaries; (3) roof detail boundaries; and (4) boundaries related to the missing planes. Finally, the junction relationships of roof plane boundaries are analyzed for detecting the roof vertices. With regard to the resulting accuracy quantification, the average values of the correctness and the completeness indices are employed in both approaches. In the filtering algorithm, their values are respectively equal to 97.5 and 98.6%, whereas they are equal to 94.0 and 94.0% in the modeling approach. These results reflect the high efficacy of the suggested approach.

Machine Learning (ML) applications on Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) data have provided promising results and thus this topic has been widely addressed in the literature during the last few years. This paper reviews the essential and the more recent completed studies in the topography and surface feature identification domain. Four areas, with respect to the suggested approaches, have been analyzed and discussed: the input data, the concepts of point cloud structure for applying ML, the ML techniques used, and the applications of ML on LiDAR data. Then, an overview is provided to underline the advantages and the disadvantages of this research axis. Despite the training data labelling problem, the calculation cost, and the undesirable shortcutting due to data downsampling, most of the proposed methods use supervised ML concepts to classify the downsampled LiDAR data. Furthermore, despite the occasional highly accurate results, in most cases the results still require filtering. In fact, a considerable number of adopted approaches use the same data structure concepts employed in image processing to profit from available informatics tools. Knowing that the LiDAR point clouds represent rich 3D data, more effort is needed to develop specialized processing tools.