Floor Area Ratio extraction based on Airborne Laser Scanning data over urban areas

Floor Area Ratio (FAR) is an important indicator in urban planning and other urban applications, therefore, it is of great significance to acquire FAR of the functional areas in the city. Traditional method to acquire FAR is slow and of low efficiency. FAR calculation by remote sensing methods can overcome these shortcomings above, so many scholars in recent year´s concerns about it. But methods through aerial photography or satellite optical images are of low accuracy and much manual intervention is needed. Airborne Laser Scanning remote sensing is a new three-dimensional information acquisition means in the urban areas. This paper presents a new method to calculate FAR using Airborne Laser Scanning Data. Experiment shows that this method can get a high rate of accuracy without a lot of human intervention.