Automated extraction of building geometry from mobile laser scanning data collected in residential environments

Spatial data collection in urban environments for the extraction of building inventory information is important for many applications, such as urban planning, storm water management, hazard mitigation, vulnerability assessment, and loss estimation, to name a few. Creating and updating building inventory databases in large and developing urban environments benefits from efficient data acquisition and data processing techniques. This study leveraged and integrated the advantages of ground-based mobile laser scanning and aerial photography through an automated method to extract building inventory information. The integration of terrestrial and aerial data enables the identification of buildings in the data set and the extraction of both roof polygons and wall footprints. The presented method was evaluated with actual data sets collected from a typical residential area. The area of roof polygons extracted by the automated approach differs by less than 5% when compared to manually calculated values. Also, the proposed method allows for accurate extraction of walls captured within the point cloud.