3D LoD2 and LoD3 Modeling of Buildings with Ornamental Towers and Turrets Based on LiDAR Data

Abstract

This paper presents an innovative approach to the automatic modeling of buildings composed of rotational surfaces, based exclusively on airborne LiDAR point clouds. The proposed approach starts by detecting the gravity center of the building’s footprint. A thin point slice parallel to one coordinate axis around the gravity center was considered, and a vertical cross-section was rotated around a vertical axis passing through the gravity center, to generate the 3D building model. The constructed model was visualized with a matrix composed of three matrices, where the same dimensions represented the X, Y, and Z Euclidean coordinates. Five tower point clouds were used to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. Then, to estimate the accuracy, the point cloud was superimposed onto the constructed model, and the deviation of points describing the building model was calculated, in addition to the standard deviation. The obtained standard deviation values, which express the accuracy, were determined in the range of 0.21 m to 1.41 m. These values indicate that the accuracy of the suggested method is consistent with approaches suggested previously in the literature. In the future, the obtained model could be enhanced with the use of points that have considerable deviations. The applied matrix not only facilitates the modeling of buildings with various levels of architectural complexity, but it also allows for local enhancement of the constructed models.