Investigation on roof segmentation for 3D building reconstruction from aerial LIDAR point clouds

Three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction techniques are increasingly used to obtain 3D representations of buildings due to the broad range of applications for 3D city models related to sustainability, efficiency and resilience (i.e., energy demand estimation, estimation of the propagation of noise in an urban environment, routing and accessibility, flood or seismic damage assessment). With advancements in airborne laser scanning (ALS), 3D modeling of urban topography has increased its potential to automatize extraction of the characteristics of individual buildings. In 3D building modeling from light detection and ranging (LIDAR) point clouds, one major challenging issue is how to efficiently and accurately segment building regions and extract rooftop features. This study aims to present an investigation and critical comparison of two different fully automatic roof segmentation approaches for 3D building reconstruction. In particular, the paper presents and compares a cluster-based roof segmentation approach that uses (a) a fuzzy c-means clustering method refined through a density clustering and connectivity analysis, and (b) a region growing segmentation approach combined with random sample consensus (RANSAC) method. In addition, a robust 2.5D dual contouring method is utilized to deliver watertight 3D building modeling from the results of each proposed segmentation approach. The benchmark LIDAR point clouds and related reference data (generated by stereo plotting) of 58 buildings over downtown Toronto (Canada), made available to the scientific community by the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS), have been used to evaluate the quality of the two proposed segmentation approaches by analysing the geometrical accuracy of the roof polygons. Moreover, the results of both approaches have been evaluated under different operating conditions against the real measurements (based on archive documentation and celerimetric surveys realized by a total station system) of a complex building located in the historical center of Matera (UNESCO world heritage site in southern Italy) that has been manually reconstructed in 3D via traditional Building Information Modeling (BIM) technique. The results demonstrate that both methods reach good performance metrics in terms of geometry accuracy. However, approach (b), based on region growing segmentation, exhibited slightly better performance but required greater computational time than the clustering-based approach.