A Novel Multi-scale 3D Area Morphological Filtering Method for Airborne LiDAR Building Extraction

Abstract

Automatic building extraction is one of the most important issues in the fields of geoscience and remote sensing. In this letter, by introducing the idea of area morphology to the analysis of 3-D point clouds, a novel approach for automatic building extraction from airborne LiDAR data was proposed. At first, single scale area opening and area closing operator was used to produce normalized point clouds. With the normalized point clouds as input, multi-scale area morphology was employed to obtain connected regions, and then tree points were removed by PCA based local structural analyzing technique. Finally, building regions were extracted by analyzing geometry properties of the obtained connected regions without tree points. Experiments for different terrains were conducted. And the corresponding experimental results are very promising.