Compound 3D building modeling with structure-aware partition and primitive assembly from airborne laser scanning point clouds

Abstract

ABSTRACT Urban digital twins and realistic three-dimensional (3D) scenes have further enhanced the ever-increasing demand for building models. Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) point clouds are the predominant data source for 3D building reconstruction owing to their highly detailed spatial features. However, information on the reconstruction of compound buildings (i.e. buildings with diverse plane structures or various roof structures) is lacking. Existing methods often produce building models that suffer from topological inconsistencies and/or geometric errors. To address these issues, this study proposes an automatic building reconstruction approach based on ALS point cloud that offers both modeling flexibility and geometric consistency. Specifically, a structure-aware partitioning algorithm that partitions a complex building roof into several regular roof patches is incorporated. Subsequently, a primitive model library comprising representative primitives suitable for building reconstruction is created. Suitable primitive model selection and reconstruction optimization are employed to ensure the accuracy and compactness in the final model. To comprehensively evaluate the performance, two typical ALS point cloud datasets are tested. Experiments demonstrate the generated models can achieve a boundary consistency of 92% while ensuring Root Mean Square Error below 0.09 m. Comparative experiments with state-of-the-art methods further validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in compound building reconstruction.