A Study on Automatic Extraction of Buildings Using LIDAR with Aerial Imagery

This paper presents an algorithm that automatically extracts buildings among many different features on the earth surface by fusing LIDAR data with panchromatic aerial images. The proposed algorithm consists of three stages such as point level process, polygon level process, parameter space level process. At the first stage, we eliminate gross errors and apply a local maxima filter to detect building candidate points from the raw laser scanning data. After then, a grouping procedure is performed for segmenting raw LIDAR data and the segmented LIDAR data is polygonized by the encasing polygon algorithm developed in the research. At the second stage, we eliminate non-building polygons using several constraints such as area and circularity. At the last stage, all the polygons generated at the second stage are projected onto the aerial stereo images through collinearity condition equations. Finally, we fuse the projected encasing polygons with edges detected by image processing for refining the building segments. The experimental results showed that the RMSEs of building corners in X, Y and Z were ${\pm}$8.1㎝, ${\pm}$24.7㎝, ${\pm}$35.9㎝, respectively.