COMPLEX BUILDING DETECTION THROUGH INTEGRATING LIDAR AND AERIAL PHOTOS

Abstract. This paper proposes a new approach on digital building detection through the integration of LiDAR data and aerial imagery. It is known that most building rooftops are represented by different regions from different seed pixels. Considering the principals of image segmentation, this paper employs a new region based technique to segment images, combining both the advantages of LiDAR and aerial images together. First, multiple seed points are selected by taking several constraints into consideration in an automated way. Then, the region growing procedures proceed by combining the elevation attribute from LiDAR data, visibility attribute from DEM (Digital Elevation Model), and radiometric attribute from warped images in the segmentation. Through this combination, the pixels with similar height, visibility, and spectral attributes are merged into one region, which are believed to represent the whole building area. The proposed methodology was implemented on real data and competitive results were achieved.