Abstract
3D buildings are the most prominent feature comprising urban scene. A few of mega-cities in the globe are virtually reconstructed in photo-realistic 3D models, which becomes accessible by the public through the state-of-the-art online mapping services. A lot of research efforts have been made to develop automatic reconstruction technique of large-scale 3D building models from remotely sensed data. However, existing methods still produce irregular building polygons due to errors induced partly by uncalibrated sensor system, scene complexity and partly inappropriate sensor resolution to observed object scales. Thus, a geometric regularization technique is urgently required to rectify such irregular building polygons that are quickly captured from low sensory data. This paper aims to develop a new method for regularizing noise building outlines extracted from airborne LiDAR data, and to evaluate its performance in comparison with existing methods. These include Douglas-Peucker's polyline simplication, total least-squared adjustment, model hypothesis-verification, and rule-based rectification. Based on Minimum Description Length (MDL) principal, a new objective function, Geometric Minimum Description Length (GMDL), to regularize geometric noises is introduced to enhance the repetition of identical line directionality, regular angle transition and to minimize the number of vertices used. After generating hypothetical regularized models, a global optimum of the geometric regularity is achieved by verifying the entire solution space. A comparative evaluation of the proposed geometric regulator is conducted using both simulated and real building vectors with various levels of noise. The results show that the GMDL outperforms the selected existing algorithms at the most of noise levels.
