Detection of Building in Airborne Laser Scanner Data and Aerial Images

Abstract

The automatic extraction of the objects from airborne laser scanner data and aerial images has been a topic of research for decades. Airborne laser scanner data are very efficient source for the detection of the buildings. Half of the world population lives in urban/suburban areas, so detailed, accurate and up-to-date building information is of great importance to every resident, government agencies, and private companies.

The main objective of this paper is to extract the features for the detection of building using airborne laser scanner data and aerial images. To achieve this objective, a method of integration both LiDAR and aerial images has been explored: thus the advantages of both data sets are utilized to derive the buildings with high accuracy. Airborne laser scanner data contains accurate elevation information in high resolution which is very important feature to detect the elevated objects like buildings and the aerial image has spectral information and this spectral information is an appropriate feature to separate buildings from the trees. Planner region growing segmentation of LiDAR point cloud has been performed and normalized digital surface model (nDSM) is obtained by subtracting DTM from the DSM. Integration of the nDSM, aerial images and the segmented polygon features from the LiDAR point cloud has been carried out. The optimal features for the building detection have been extracted from the integration result. Mean height value of the nDSM, Normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and the standard deviation of the nDSM are the effective features. The accuracy assessment of the classification results obtained using the calculated attributes was done. Assessment result yielded an accuracy of almost 92 % explaining the features which are extracted by integrating the two data sets was large extent, effective for the automatic detection of the buildings.