An approach to urban building height and floor estimation by using LiDAR data

Abstract

Assessment of precise, fast, and up-to-date building and building floor data are essential for urban design, planning, and management and urban environmental studies. These maps are frequently required for tracking building construction speed, monitoring horizontal and vertical urban growth and illegal constructions, updating building records, preparing reasonable urban plans, assessing hazard and risk, and generating infrastructure plans. In this study, a combination of aerial photographs and LiDAR data are used to produce individual building heights and then estimate building the floor. The two recorded laser pulse reflections of LiDAR point cloud data: First pulse (FP) and last pulse (LP) reflections were used to obtain the digital surface model (DSM) and the digital terrain model (DTM), respectively. The normalized digital surface model (nDSM) is calculated to obtain the height values of each building. The accuracy of the proposed algorithm is assessed for each building floor using ground truth data and has shown an overall accuracy of 79% and a kappa equal to 0.74 which is a promising result.