3-Dimensional Building Reconstruction with Airborne LiDAR Data

LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) system has a profound impact on geoinformatics. The laser mapping system is now recognized as being a viable system to produce the digital surface model rapidly and efficiently. Indeed the number of its applications and users has grown at a surprising rate in recent years. Interest is now focused on the reconstruction of buildings in urban areas from LiDAR data. Although with present technology objects can be extracted and reconstructed automatically using LiDAR data, the quality issue of the results is still major concern in terms of geometric accuracy. It would be enormously beneficial to the geoinformatics industry if geometrically accurate modeling of topographic surface including man-made objects could be produced automatically. The objectives of this study are to reconstruct buildings using airborne LiDAR data and to evaluate accuracy of the result. In these regards, firstly systematic errors involved with ALS (Airborne Laser Scanning) system are introduced. Secondly, the overall LiDAR data quality was estimated based on the ground check points, then classifying the laser points was performed. In this study, buildings were reconstructed from the classified as building laser point clouds. The most likely planar surfaces were estimated by the least-square method using the laser points classified as being planes. Intersecting lines of the planes were then computed and these were defined as the building boundaries. Finally, quality of the reconstructed building was evaluated.