Integration of building knowledge into binary space partitioning for the reconstruction of regularized building models

Abstract

Recent approaches for the automatic reconstruction of 3D building models from airborne point cloud data integrate prior knowledge of roof shapes with the intention to improve the regularization of the resulting models without lessening the flexibility to generate all real-world occurring roof shapes. In this paper, we present a method to integrate building knowledge into the data-driven approach that uses binary space partitioning (BSP) for modeling the 3D building geometry. A retrospective regularization of polygons that emerge from the BSP tree is not without difficulty because it has to deal with the 2D BSP subdivision itself and the plane definitions of the resulting partition regions to ensure topological correctness. This is aggravated by the use of hyperplanes during the binary subdivision that often splits planar roof regions into several parts that are stored in different subtrees of the BSP tree. We therefore introduce the use of hyperpolylines in the generation of the BSP tree to avoid unnecessary spatial subdivisions, so that the spatial integrity of planar roof regions is better maintained. The hyperpolylines are shown to result from basic building roof knowledge that is extracted based on roof topology graphs. An adjustment of the underlying point segments ensures that the positions of the extracted hyperpolylines result in regularized 2D partitions as well as topologically correct 3D building models. The validity and limitations of the approach are demonstrated on real-world examples. © 2015 Copernicus GmbH. All Rights Reserved.