IMPACT OF BUILDING HEIGHTS ON 3D URBAN DENSITY ESTIMATION FROM SPACEBORNE STEREO IMAGERY

Abstract. In urban planning and design applications, visualization of built up areas in three dimensions (3D) is critical for understanding building density, but the accurate building heights required for 3D density calculation are not always available. To solve this problem, spaceborne stereo imagery is often used to estimate building heights; however estimated building heights might include errors. These errors vary between local areas within a study area and related to the heights of the building themselves, distorting 3D density estimation. The impact of building height accuracy on 3D density estimation must be determined across and within a study area. In our research, accurate planar information from city authorities is used during 3D density estimation as reference data, to avoid the errors inherent to planar information extracted from remotely sensed imagery. Our experimental results show that underestimation of building heights is correlated to underestimation of the Floor Area Ratio (FAR). In local areas, experimental results show that land use blocks with low FAR values often have small errors due to small building height errors for low buildings in the blocks; and blocks with high FAR values often have large errors due to large building height errors for high buildings in the blocks. Our study reveals that the accuracy of 3D density estimated from spaceborne stereo imagery is correlated to heights of buildings in a scene; therefore building heights must be considered when spaceborne stereo imagery is used to estimate 3D density to improve precision.