3D LoD2 and LoD3 Modeling of Buildings with Ornamental Towers and Turrets Based on LiDAR Data

Abstract

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.

Modeling Multi-Rotunda Buildings at LoD3 Level from LiDAR Data

“…This cited study proposed an algorithm for rendering ornamental features in greater detail and capturing these buildings' unique ambiance. The method proposed in [45] was based on modeling the rotunda based on only one point cloud cross-section.…”

“…The presented study in this paper intends to improve and extend the algorithm proposed by Lewandowicz et al [45] to capture and enhance the presentation of unique structural elements of buildings. In this context, the novelties of our work, as well as the objectives, are formulated as follows:…”

“…where Xg and Yg are the coordinates of the point cloud gravity center according to Lewandowicz et al [45] as shown in Equation (2).…”

“…In this section, the suggested algorithm will be extended to consider all cloud points without neglect. For this purpose, the coordinates of non-considered points are used to modify the rotating surface depicted by Equations ( 3)-( 5) [45].…”

“…These buildings are particularly difficult to model based solely on aerial images. The presented study in this paper was undertaken to further explore this issue based on the authors' previous findings [45].…”