Area-wide roof plane segmentation in airborne LiDAR point clouds

Most algorithms performing segmentation of 3D point cloud data acquired by, e.g. Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) systems are not suitable for large study areas because the huge amount of point cloud data cannot be processed in the computer’s main memory. In this study a new workflow for seamless automated roof plane detection from ALS data is presented and applied to a large study area. The design of the workflow allows area-wide segmentation of roof planes on common computer hardware but leaves the option open to be combined with distributed computing (e.g. cluster and grid environments). The workflow that is fully implemented in a Geographical Information System (GIS) uses the geometrical information of the 3D point cloud and involves four major steps: (i) The whole dataset is divided into several overlapping subareas, i.e. tiles. (ii) A raster based candidate region detection algorithm is performed for each tile that identifies potential areas containing buildings. (iii) The resulting building candidate regions of all tiles are merged and those areas overlapping one another from adjacent tiles are united to a single building area. (iv) Finally, three dimensional roof planes are extracted from the building candidate regions and each region is treated separately. The presented workflow reduces the data volume of the point cloud that has to be analyzed significantly and leads to the main advantage that seamless area-wide point cloud based segmentation can be performed without requiring a computationally intensive algorithm detecting and combining segments being part of several subareas (i.e. processing tiles). A reduction of 85% of the input data volume for point cloud segmentation in the presented study area could be achieved, which directly decreases computation time.