3D building reconstruction from airborne lidar point clouds fused with aerial imagery - Urban Remote Sensing: Monitoring, Synthesis and Modeling in the Urban Environment - page 69

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3D building reconstruction from
airborne lidar point clouds fused
with aerial imagery
Jonathan Li and Haiyan Guan
Lidar mapping technology can be used to provide building data that is three-dimensional (3D), accurate, timely,
and increasingly affordable in complex urban areas. However, the automated creation of reliable and accurate 3D
city models is still challenging. Commercial software tools for building modeling generally require a high degree of
human interaction and most automated approaches described in literature stress steps of such a workflow
individually. This chapter first briefly reviews the existing techniques for building extraction using airborne lidar
range data. Then, we present a comprehensive approach for automated creation of 3D building models from
airborne lidar point cloud data fused with color aerial imagery. Our two-step building extraction strategy, building
detection followed by building reconstruction, is then detailed and implemented using a set of lidar data covering a
Toronto study area collected by Optech ALTM 3100 system. Finally, the results obtained are presented and
discussed.