Automatic 3D Extraction of Buildings, Vegetation and Roads from LIDAR Data

Abstract. Aerial topographic surveys using Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology collect dense and accurate information from the surface or terrain; it is becoming one of the important tools in the geosciences for studying objects and earth surface. Classification of Lidar data for extracting ground, vegetation, and buildings is a very important step needed in numerous applications such as 3D city modelling, extraction of different derived data for geographical information systems (GIS), mapping, navigation, etc... Regardless of what the scan data will be used for, an automatic process is greatly required to handle the large amount of data collected because the manual process is time consuming and very expensive.

This paper is presenting an approach for automatic classification of aerial Lidar data into five groups of items: buildings, trees, roads, linear object and soil using single return Lidar and processing the point cloud without generating DEM. Topological relationship and height variation analysis is adopted to segment, preliminary, the entire point cloud preliminarily into upper and lower contours, uniform and non-uniform surface, non-uniform surfaces, linear objects, and others.

This primary classification is used on the one hand to know the upper and lower part of each building in an urban scene, needed to model buildings façades; and on the other hand to extract point cloud of uniform surfaces which contain roofs, roads and ground used in the second phase of classification. A second algorithm is developed to segment the uniform surface into buildings roofs, roads and ground, the second phase of classification based on the topological relationship and height variation analysis, The proposed approach has been tested using two areas : the first is a housing complex and the second is a primary school. The proposed approach led to successful classification results of buildings, vegetation and road classes.