Efficient building facade structure extraction method using image-based laser point cloud

Facade structures from three-dimensional (3D) point cloud data (PCD) and two-dimensional (2D) optical images can provide significant information for 3D building modeling. However, a unified data model for integrating 2D imagery pixels and 3D PCD is absent in current methods, leading to a complex implementation process, large calculations, and inefficiency. An efficient facade structure extraction method for building facades is proposed in this study. Based on the conversion matrix, 2D image and 3D PCD information are merged to build an image-based laser point cloud (ILPC) data model first. Second, both the line segment detection and random sample consensus algorithms are improved according to the structure and characteristics of the ILPC data model. Finally, building facade structures are extracted and optimized. Facade structures can be extracted accurately and efficiently by the proposed method, which contains rich information support from the ILPC data model. The proposed method extracts fine building facade structures with accuracy over 0.68 in all experiments and recall up to 0.81, which are better than the Wang method. Extracted structures constitute valuable support for numerous fields, such as 3D building modeling and building information modeling construction.