Extracting outlined planar clusters of street facades from 3D point clouds

This paper presents an approach for extracting 3D outlined planar clusters of street facades. Terrestrial laser data are acquired using a Mobile Mapping System (MMS). Mapping of street facades is of great interest in various digital mapping and robotic research topics. After a filtering step of the 3D point cloud, the dominant hypothetical facade planes are detected using an adapted Progressive Probabilistic Hough Transform (PPHT). The corresponding planar clusters are extracted using a priori geometric knowledge of street. The clusters are horizontally and vertically delimited using heuristic approaches. The adapted PPHT allows the automatic extraction of georeferenced planar clusters of facades with a fine detection of dominant facade lines and a low computation time. The adopted approach has been tested on a set of point cloud acquired in the city of Paris under real conditions. Examples and experimental results show the efficiency and the potential of the proposed approach.