Description:
Effective building detection and roof reconstruction has an influential demand over the remote sensing research community. In this paper, we present a new automatic LiDAR point cloud segmentation method using suitable seed points for building detection and roof plane extraction. Firstly, the LiDAR point cloud is separated into "ground" and "non-ground" points based on the analysis of DEM with a height threshold. Each of the non-ground point is marked as coplanar or non-coplanar based on a coplanarity analysis. Commencing from the maximum LiDAR point height towards the minimum, all the LiDAR points on each height level are extracted and separated into several groups based on 2D distance. From each group, lines are extracted and a coplanar point which is the nearest to the midpoint of each line is considered as a seed point. This seed point and its neighbouring points are utilised to generate the plane equation. The plane is grown in a region growing fashion until no new points can be added. A robust rule-based tree removal method is applied subsequently to remove planar segments on trees. Four different rules are applied in this method. Finally, the boundary of each object is extracted from the segmented LiDAR point cloud. The method is evaluated with six different data sets consisting hilly and densely vegetated areas. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method offers a high building detection and roof plane extraction rates while compared to a recently proposed method.
Description:
This paper presents a new LiDAR segmentation technique for automatic building detection and roof plane extraction. First, it uses a height threshold, based on the digital elevation model it divides the LiDAR point cloud into 'ground' and 'non-ground' points. Then, starting from the maximum LiDAR height, and decreasing the height at each iteration, it looks for points to form planar roof segments. At each height level, it clusters the points based on the distance and finds straight lines using the points. The nearest coplanar point to the midpoint of each line is used as a seed point and the plane is grown in a region growing fashion. Finally, a rule-based procedure is followed to remove planar segments in trees. The experimental results show that the proposed technique offers a high building detection and roof plane extraction rates while compared to other recently proposed techniques.
Description:
There are many applications, such as image copyright protection, where transformed images of a given test image need to be identified. The solution to this identification problem consists of two main stages. In stage one, certain representative features, such as corners, are detected in all images. In stage two, the representative features of the test image and the stored images are compared to identify the transformed images for the test image. Curvature scale-space (CSS) corner detectors look for curvature maxima or inflection points on planar curves. However, the arc-length used to parameterize the planar curves by the existing CSS detectors is not invariant to geometric transformations such as scaling. As a solution to stage one, this paper presents an improved CSS corner detector using the affine-length parameterization which is relatively invariant to affine transformations. We then present an improved corner matching technique as a solution to the stage two. Finally, we apply the proposed corner detection and matching techniques to identify the transformed images for a given image and report the promising results.
Description:
Automatic 3D extraction of building roofs from remotely sensed data is important for many applications including city modeling. This paper proposes a new method for automatic 3D roof extraction through an effective integration of LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) data and multispectral orthoimagery. Using the ground height from a DEM (Digital Elevation Model), the raw LIDAR points are separated into two groups. The first group contains the ground points that are exploited to constitute a `ground mask'. The second group contains the non-ground points which are segmented using an innovative image line guided segmentation technique to extract the roof planes. The image lines extracted from the grey-scale version of the orthoimage are classified into several classes such as `ground', `tree', `roof edge' and `roof ridge' using the ground mask and colour and texture information from the orthoimagery. During roof plane extraction the lines from the later two classes are used to fit roof planes to the neighbouring non-ground LIDAR points. Finally, a new rule-based procedure is applied to remove planes constructed on trees. Experimental results show that the proposed method successfully removes vegetation and offers high extraction rates.
Description:
This paper presents a new method for segmentation of LIDAR point cloud data for automatic building extraction. Using the ground height from a DEM (Digital Elevation Model), the non-ground points (mainly buildings and trees) are separated from the ground points. Points on walls are removed from the set of non-ground points by applying the following two approaches: If a plane fitted at a point and its neighbourhood is perpendicular to a fictitious horizontal plane, then this point is designated as a wall point. When LIDAR points are projected on a dense grid, points within a narrow area close to an imaginary vertical line on the wall should fall into the same grid cell. If three or more points fall into the same cell, then the intermediate points are removed as wall points. The remaining non-ground points are then divided into clusters based on height and local neighbourhood. One or more clusters are initialised based on the maximum height of the points and then each cluster is extended by applying height and neighbourhood constraints. Planar roof segments are extracted from each cluster of points following a region-growing technique. Planes are initialised using coplanar points as seed points and then grown using plane compatibility tests. If the estimated height of a point is similar to its LIDAR generated height, or if its normal distance to a plane is within a predefined limit, then the point is added to the plane. Once all the planar segments are extracted, the common points between the neghbouring planes are assigned to the appropriate planes based on the plane intersection line, locality and the angle between the normal at a common point and the corresponding plane. A rule-based procedure is applied to remove tree planes which are small in size and randomly oriented. The neighbouring planes are then merged to obtain individual building boundaries, which are regularised based on long line segments. Experimental results on ISPRS benchmark data sets show that the proposed method offers higher building detection and roof plane extraction rates than many existing methods, especially in complex urban scenes.
Description:
This paper presents a new method for segmentation of LIDAR point cloud data for automatic building extraction. Using the ground height from a DEM (Digital Elevation Model), the non-ground points (mainly buildings and trees) are separated from the ground points. Points on walls are removed from the set of non-ground points by applying the following two approaches: If a plane fitted at a point and its neighbourhood is perpendicular to a fictitious horizontal plane, then this point is designated as a wall point. When LIDAR points are projected on a dense grid, points within a narrow area close to an imaginary vertical line on the wall should fall into the same grid cell. If three or more points fall into the same cell, then the intermediate points are removed as wall points. The remaining non-ground points are then divided into clusters based on height and local neighbourhood. One or more clusters are initialised based on the maximum height of the points and then each cluster is extended by applying height and neighbourhood constraints. Planar roof segments are extracted from each cluster of points following a region-growing technique. Planes are initialised using coplanar points as seed points and then grown using plane compatibility tests. If the estimated height of a point is similar to its LIDAR generated height, or if its normal distance to a plane is within a predefined limit, then the point is added to the plane. Once all the planar segments are extracted, the common points between the neghbouring planes are assigned to the appropriate planes based on the plane intersection line, locality and the angle between the normal at a common point and the corresponding plane. A rule-based procedure is applied to remove tree planes which are small in size and randomly oriented. The neighbouring planes are then merged to obtain individual building boundaries, which are regularised based on long line segments. Experimental results on ISPRS benchmark data sets show that the proposed method offers higher building detection and roof plane extraction rates than many existing methods, especially in complex urban scenes.
Description:
This paper presents a new segmentation technique to use LIDAR point cloud data for automatic extraction of building roof planes. The raw LIDAR points are first classified into two major groups: ground and non-ground points. The ground points are used to generate a 'building mask' in which the black areas represent the ground where there are no laser returns below a certain height. The non-ground points are segmented to extract the planar roof segments. First, the building mask is divided into small grid cells. The cells containing the black pixels are clustered such that each cluster represents an individual building or tree. Second, the non-ground points within a cluster are segmented based on their coplanarity and neighbourhood relations. Third, the planar segments are refined using a rule-based procedure that assigns the common points among the planar segments to the appropriate segments. Finally, another rule-based procedure is applied to remove tree planes which are generally small in size and randomly oriented. Experimental results on three Australian sites have shown that the proposed method offers high building detection and roof plane extraction rates.
Description:
Contour-based corner detectors directly or indirectly estimate a significance measure (e.g. curvature) on the points of a planar curve and select the curvature extrema points as corners. While an extensive number of contour-based corner detectors have been proposed over the last four decades, there is no comparative study of recently proposed promising detectors. This paper is an attempt to fill this gap. We present the general frame-work of the contour-based corner detection technique and discuss two major issues - curve smoothing and curvature estimation, which have major impacts on the corner detection performance. A number of promising detectors are compared using an automatic evaluation system on a common large dataset. It is observed that while the detectors using indirect curvature estimation techniques are more robust, the detectors using direct curvature estimation techniques are faster.
Description:
Building data are one of the important data types in a topographic database. Building change detection after a period of time is necessary for many applications, such as identification of informal settlements. Based on the detected changes, the database has to be updated to ensure its usefulness. This paper proposes an improved building detection technique, which is a prerequisite for many building change detection techniques. The improved technique examines the gap between neighbouring buildings in the building mask in order to avoid under segmentation errors. Then, a new building change detection technique from LIDAR point cloud data is proposed. Buildings which are totally new or demolished are directly added to the change detection output. However, for demolished or extended building parts, a connected component analysis algorithm is applied and for each connected component its area, width and height are estimated in order to ascertain if it can be considered as a demolished or new building part. Finally, a graphical user interface (GUI) has been developed to update detected changes to the existing building map. Experimental results show that the improved building detection technique can offer not only higher performance in terms of completeness and correctness, but also a lower number of under-segmentation errors as compared to its original counterpart. The proposed change detection technique produces no omission errors and thus it can be exploited for enhanced automated building information updating within a topographic database. Using the developed GUI, the user can quickly examine each suggested change and indicate his/her decision with a minimum number of mouse clicks.
Description:
Building data are one of the important data types in a topographic database. Building change detection after a period of time is necessary for many applications, such as identification of informal settlements. Based on the detected changes, the database has to be updated to ensure its usefulness. This paper proposes an improved building detection technique, which is a prerequisite for many building change detection techniques. The improved technique examines the gap between neighbouring buildings in the building mask in order to avoid under segmentation errors. Then, a new building change detection technique from LIDAR point cloud data is proposed. Buildings which are totally new or demolished are directly added to the change detection output. However, for demolished or extended building parts, a connected component analysis algorithm is applied and for each connected component its area, width and height are estimated in order to ascertain if it can be considered as a demolished or new building part. Finally, a graphical user interface (GUI) has been developed to update detected changes to the existing building map. Experimental results show that the improved building detection technique can offer not only higher performance in terms of completeness and correctness, but also a lower number of under-segmentation errors as compared to its original counterpart. The proposed change detection technique produces no omission errors and thus it can be exploited for enhanced automated building information updating within a topographic database. Using the developed GUI, the user can quickly examine each suggested change and indicate his/her decision with a minimum number of mouse clicks.
Description:
This paper presents an automatic building detection technique using LIDAR data and multispectral imagery. Two masks are obtained from the LIDAR data: a ‘primary building mask’ and a ‘secondary building mask’. The primary building mask indicates the void areas where the laser does not reach below a certain height threshold. The secondary building mask indicates the filled areas, from where the laser reflects, above the same threshold. Line segments are extracted from around the void areas in the primary building mask. Line segments around trees are removed using the normalized difference vegetation index derived from the orthorectified multispectral images. The initial building positions are obtained based on the remaining line segments. The complete buildings are detected from their initial positions using the two masks and multispectral images in the YIQ colour system. It is experimentally shown that the proposed technique can successfully detect urban residential buildings, when assessed in terms of 15 indices including completeness, correctness and quality.
Description:
Abstract—The previously proposed contour-based multi-scale corner detector based on the chord-to-point distance accumulation (CPDA) technique has proved its superior robustness over many other single- and multi-scale detectors. However, the original CPDA detector is computationally expensive since it calculates the CPDA discrete curvature on each point of the curve. The proposed improvement obtains a set of probable candidate points before the CPDA curvature estimation. The CPDA curvature is estimated on these chosen candidate points only. Consequently, the improved CPDA detector becomes faster, while retaining a similar robustness to the original CPDA detector.
Description:
This paper presents a segmentation of LIDAR point cloud data for automatic extraction of building footprint. Using the ground height information from a DEM (Digital Elevation Model), the non-ground points (mainly buildings and trees) are separated from the ground points. Points on walls are removed from the set of non-ground points. The remaining non-ground points are then divided into clusters based on height and local neighbourhood. Planar roof segments are extracted from each cluster of points following a region-growing technique. Planes are initialised using coplanar points as seed points and then grown using plane compatibility tests. Once all the planar segments are extracted, a rule-based procedure is applied to remove tree planes which are small in size and randomly oriented. The neighbouring planes are then merged to obtain individual building boundaries, which are regularised based on a new feature-based technique. Corners and line-segments are extracted from each boundary and adjusted using the assumption that each short building side is parallel or perpendicular to one or more neighbouring long building sides. Experimental results on five Australian data sets show that the proposed method offers higher correctness rate in building footprint extraction than a state-of-the-art method.
Description:
Abstract— Corner detectors have many applications in computer vision and image identification and retrieval. Contour-based corner detectors directly or indirectly estimate a significance measure (e.g., curvature) on the points of a planar curve, and select the curvature extrema points as corners. While an extensive number of contour-based corner detectors have been proposed over the last four decades, there is no comparative study of recently proposed detectors. This paper is an attempt to fill this gap. The general framework of contour-based corner detection is presented, and two major issues – curve smoothing and curvature estimation, which have major impacts on the corner detection performance, are discussed. A number of promising detectors are compared using both automatic and manual evaluation systems on two large datasets. It is observed that while the detectors using indirect curvature estimation techniques are more robust, the detectors using direct curvature estimation techniques are faster.
Description:
Contour-based corner detectors directly or indirectly estimate a significance measure (eg, curvature) on the points of a planar curve and select the curvature extrema points as corners. A number of promising contour-based corner detectors have recently been proposed. They mainly differ in how the curvature is estimated on each point of the given curve. As the curvature on a digital curve can only be approximated, it is important to estimate a curvature that remains stable against significant noises, for example, geometric transformations and compression, on the curve. Moreover, in many applications, for instance, in content-based image retrieval, a fast corner detector is a prerequisite. So, it is also a primary characteristic that how much time a corner detector takes for corner detection in a given image. In addition, different authors evaluated their detectors on different platforms using different evaluation systems. Evaluation systems that depend on human judgements and visual identification of corners are manual and too subjective. Application of a manual system on a large test database will be expensive. Therefore, it is important to evaluate the detectors on a common platform using an automatic evaluation system. This paper first reviews six most recent and highly performed corner detectors and analyse their theoretical running time. Then it uses an automatic evaluation system to analyse their performance. Both the robustness to noise and efficiency are estimated to rank the detectors.
Description:
Contour-based corner detectors directly or indirectly estimate a significance measure (eg, curvature) on the points of a planar curve and select the curvature extrema points as corners. A number of promising contour-based corner detectors have recently been proposed. They mainly differ in how the curvature is estimated on each point of the given curve. As the curvature on a digital curve can only be approximated, it is important to estimate a curvature that remains stable against significant noises, for example, geometric transformations and compression, on the curve. Moreover, in many applications, for instance, in content-based image retrieval, a fast corner detector is a prerequisite. So, it is also a primary characteristic that how much time a corner detector takes for corner detection in a given image. In addition, different authors evaluated their detectors on different platforms using different evaluation systems. Evaluation systems that depend on human judgements and visual identification of corners are manual and too subjective. Application of a manual system on a large test database will be expensive. Therefore, it is important to evaluate the detectors on a common platform using an automatic evaluation system. This paper first reviews six most recent and highly performed corner detectors and analyse their theoretical running time. Then it uses an automatic evaluation system to analyse their performance. Both the robustness to noise and efficiency are estimated to rank the detectors.
Description:
The SIFT (scale invariant feature transform) has demonstrated its superior performance in identifying transformed images over many other approaches. However, both of its detection and matching stages are expensive, because a large number of keypoints are detected in the scale-space and each keypoint is described using a 128-dimensional vector. We present two possible solutions for feature-point reduction. First is to down scale the image before the SIFT keypoint detection and second is to use corners (instead of SIFT keypoints) which are visually significant, more robust, and much smaller in number than the SIFT keypoints. Either the curvature descriptor or the highly distinctive SIFT descriptors at corner locations can be used to represent corners.We then describe a new feature-point matching technique, which can be used for matching both the down-scaled SIFT keypoints and corners. Experimental results show that two feature-point reduction solutions combined with the SIFT descriptors and the proposed feature-point matching technique not only improve the computational efficiency and decrease the storage requirement, but also improve the transformed image identification accuracy (robustness).
Description:
Automatic 3D extraction of building roofs from remotely sensed data is important for many applications including city modelling. This paper proposes a new method for automatic 3D roof extraction through an effective integration of LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) data and multispectral orthoimagery. Using the ground height from a DEM (Digital Elevation Model), the raw LIDAR points are separated into two groups. The first group contains the ground points that are exploited to constitute a ‘ground mask’. The second group contains the non-ground points which are segmented using an innovative image line guided segmentation technique to extract the roof planes. The image lines are extracted from the grey-scale version of the orthoimage and then classified into several classes such as ‘ground’, ‘tree’, ‘roof edge’ and ‘roof ridge’ using the ground mask and colour and texture information from the orthoimagery. During segmentation of the non-ground LIDAR points, the lines from the latter two classes are used as baselines to locate the nearby LIDAR points of the neighbouring planes. For each plane a robust seed region is thereby defined using the nearby non-ground LIDAR points of a baseline and this region is iteratively grown to extract the complete roof plane. Finally, a newly proposed rule-based procedure is applied to remove planes constructed on trees. Experimental results show that the proposed method can successfully remove vegetation and so offers high extraction rates.