Knowledge based reconstruction of building models from terrestrial laser scanning data

This paper presents an automatic method for reconstruction of building facade models from terrestrial laser scanning data. Important facade elements such as walls and roofs are distinguished as features. Knowledge about the features' sizes, positions, orientations, and topology is then introduced to recognize these features in a segmented laser point cloud. An outline polygon of each feature is generated by least squares fitting, convex hull fitting or concave polygon fitting, according to the size of the feature. Knowledge is used again to hypothesise the occluded parts from the directly extracted feature polygons. Finally, a polyhedron building model is combined from extracted feature polygons and hypothesised parts. The reconstruction method is tested with two data sets containing various building shapes. (C) 2009 International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Inc. (ISPRS). Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.