Roof Segmentation From Airborne LiDAR Using Octree-Based Hybrid Region Growing and Boundary Neighborhood Verification Voting

Building roof segmentation is a key step in the process of 3-D building reconstruction using airborne light detection and ranging point cloud data. Voxel-based region growing is one of the most widely used methods to segment planes because of its high efficiency and easy implementation, but it is easy to omit roof planes due to the unreasonable voxel size and the complex roof structures. In addition, boundaries between adjacent roof planes are inaccurate. To solve the issues, a roof segmentation method using octree-based hybrid region growing and boundary neighborhood verification voting is proposed. First, an octree-based voxelization is performed on the raw building points to generate two basic units: planar voxels and individual points (i.e., points that are not in the planar voxels). Then, the hybrid region growing is conducted on these two basic units to segment coarse roof planes. A parameter-free boundary neighborhood verification voting strategy is used to assign the boundary points to the correct roof planes by verifying the neighborhoods of the boundary points and using reliable neighborhood information. Experimental results of four datasets, including two datasets provided by the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing and two high-density datasets provided by OpenTopography, verify that roof planes can be successfully segmented by the proposed method with over 96.8% completeness and a minimum of 93.2% correctness. In addition, boundary points are assigned to the correct roof planes by the neighborhood verification voting strategy. Thus, the segmented roof planes can be used in various applications.