Extraction of damaged building's geometric features from multi-source point clouds

There is no single sensor can acquire the complete information for disaster monitoring. This study investigates the applicability of registering multiple point clouds obtained from unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images and terrestrial laser scanning (TLS). Low attitude images with high overlaps were collected by an eight-rotor UAV platform and image-based 3D modeling techniques are used to generate 3D point cloud, covering most of roof information of the damaged buildings. TLS was used to collect the side information of the damaged buildings with multiple scans. Point clouds from the two platforms are iteratively registered using a method, from coarse to fine, to get complete geometry of the study area. Geometric features are subsequently extracted to help for the identification of damage degree of buildings. Experimental result shows that by analyzing the intersection lines of plane features, we can further detect the building's inclination.