Building segmentation and outline extraction from UAV image-derived point clouds by a line growing algorithm

ABSTRACT This paper presents an approach to process raw unmanned aircraft vehicle (UAV) image-derived point clouds for automatically detecting, segmenting and regularizing buildings of complex urban landscapes. For regularizing, we mean the extraction of the building footprints with precise position and details. In the first step, vegetation points were extracted using a support vector machine (SVM) classifier based on vegetation indexes calculated from color information, then the traditional hierarchical stripping classification method was applied to classify and segment individual buildings. In the second step, we first determined the building boundary points with a modified convex hull algorithm. Then, we further segmented these points such that each point was assigned to a fitting line using a line growing algorithm. Then, two mutually perpendicular directions of each individual building were determined through a W-k-means clustering algorithm which used the slop information and principal direction constraints. Eventually, the building edges were regularized to form the final building footprints. Qualitative and quantitative measures were used to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach by comparing the digitized results from ortho images.