IQPC 2015 Track: EVALUATION OF AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED 2D FOOTPRINTS FROM URBAN LIDAR DATA

Abstract. Over the last decade, several automatic approaches have been proposed to extract and reconstruct 2D building footprints and 2D road profiles from ALS data, satellite images, and/or aerial imagery. Since these methods have to date been applied to various data sets and assessed through a variety of different quality indicators and ground truths, comparing the relative effectiveness of the techniques and identifying their strengths and short-comings has not been possible in a systematic way. This contest as part of IQPC15 was designed to determine pros and cons of submitted approaches in generating 2D footprint of a city region from ALS data. Specifically, participants were asked to submit 2D footprints (building outlines and road profiles) derived from ALS data from a highly dense dataset (approximately 225 points/m²) across a 1km² of Dublin, Ireland’s city centre. The proposed evaluation strategies were designed to measure not only the capacity of each method to detect and reconstruct 2D buildings and roads but also the quality of the reconstructed building and road models in terms of shape similarity and positional accuracy.