Footprint extraction of urban buildings with LIDAR data

Building information is extremely important for many applications within the urban environment. Sufficient techniques and user-friendly tools for information extraction from remotely sensed imagery are urgently needed. This paper presents an automatic and manual approach for extracting footprints of buildings in urban areas from airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) data. First a digital surface model (DSM) was generated from the LIDAR point data. Then, objects higher than the ground surface are extracted using the generated DSM. Based on general knowledge on the study area and field visits, buildings were separated from other objects. The automatic technique for extracting the building footprints was based on different window sizes and different values of image add backs, while the manual technique was based on image segmentation. A comparison was then made to see how precise the two techniques are in detecting and extracting building footprints. Finally, the results were compared with manually digitized building reference data to conduct an accuracy assessment and the result shows that LIDAR data provide a better shape characterization of each buildings.