QEM-based simplification of building footprints from Airborne LiDAR data

This paper presents a QEM-based simplification approach for extracting and delineating building footprints from Airborne LiDAR data. Our approach consists of three steps: first of all, Digital Surface Model (DSM) is generated from the raw point cloud by using the interpolation method. Secondly, the potential points on building outlines have to be aggregated to form connected building blobs. Those blobs that exceed a certain size and have certain characteristics (e.g. consisting of planes) are supposed to be building candidates. In a third step these outlines are simplified to building footprints. The focus lies on taking the characteristics of buildings into account to produce a meaningful 2D building shape and simplifying different possibilities to generalize the building footprints.