A generative statistical approach to automatic 3D building roof reconstruction from laser scanning data

This paper presents a generative statistical approach to automatic 3D building roof reconstruction from airborne laser scanning point clouds. In previous works, bottom-up methods, e.g., points clustering, plane detection, and contour extraction, are widely used. Due to the data artefacts caused by tree clutter, reflection from windows, water features, etc., the bottom-up reconstruction in urban areas may suffer from a number of incomplete or irregular roof parts. Manually given geometric constraints are usually needed to ensure plausible results. In this work we propose an automatic process with emphasis on top-down approaches. The input point cloud is firstly pre-segmented into subzones containing a limited number of buildings to reduce the computational complexity for large urban scenes. For the building extraction and reconstruction in the subzones we propose a pure top-down statistical scheme, in which the bottom-up efforts or additional data like building footprints are no more required. Based on a predefined primitive library we conduct a generative modeling to reconstruct roof models that fit the data. Primitives are assembled into an entire roof with given rules of combination and merging. Overlaps of primitives are allowed in the assembly. The selection of roof primitives, as well as the sampling of their parameters, is driven by a variant of Markov Chain Monte Carlo technique with specified jump mechanism. Experiments are performed on data-sets of different building types (from simple houses, high-rise buildings to combined building groups) and resolutions. The results show robustness despite the data artefacts mentioned above and plausibility in reconstruction.