Building roof modeling from airborne laser scanning data based on level set approach

This paper presents a novel approach to building roof modeling, including roof plane segmentation and roof model reconstruction, from airborne laser scanning data. Segmentation is performed by minimizing an energy function formulated as multiphase level set. The energy function is minimized when each segment corresponds to one or several roof plans of the same normal vector. With this formulation, maximum n regions are segmented at a time by applying log 2 n level set functions. The roof ridges or step edges are then delineated by the union of the zero level contours of the level set functions. In the final step of segmentation, coplanar and parallel roof segments are separated into individual roof segments based on their connectivity and homogeneity. To reconstruct a 3D roof model, roof structure points are determined by intersecting adjacent roof segments or line segments of building boundary and then connected based on their topological relations inferred from the segmentation result. As a global solution to the segmentation problem, the proposed approach determines multiple roof segments at the same time, which leads to topological consistency among the segment boundaries. The paper describes the principle and solution of the multiphase level set approach and demonstrates its performance and properties with two airborne laser scanning data sets.