3D building roof reconstruction from airborne LiDAR point clouds: a framework based on a spatial database

Three-dimensional (3D) building models are essential for 3D Geographic Information Systems and play an important role in various urban management applications. Although several light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data-based reconstruction approaches have made significant advances toward the fully automatic generation of 3D building models, the process is still tedious and time-consuming, especially for massive point clouds. This paper introduces a new framework that utilizes a spatial database to achieve high performance via parallel computation for fully automatic 3D building roof reconstruction from airborne LiDAR data. The framework integrates data-driven and model-driven methods to produce building roof models of the primary structure with detailed features. The framework is composed of five major components: (1) a density-based clustering algorithm to segment individual buildings, (2) an improved boundary-tracing algorithm, (3) a hybrid method for segmenting planar patches that selects seed points in parameter space and grows the regions in spatial space, (4) a boundary regularization approach that considers outliers and (5) a method for reconstructing the topological and geometrical information of building roofs using the intersections of planar patches. The entire process is based on a spatial database, which has the following advantages: (a) managing and querying data efficiently, especially for millions of LiDAR points, (b) utilizing the spatial analysis functions provided by the system, reducing tedious and time-consuming computation, and (c) using parallel computing while reconstructing 3D building roof models, improving performance.