Automatic Building Detection From Lidar Point Cloud Data

This paper proposes an automatic system which detects buildings in urban and rural areas by the use of first pulse return and last pulse return LIDAR data. Initially both first and last pulse return points are interpolated to raster images. This results to two Digital Surface Models (i.e. DSM) and a Differential DSM (i.e. DDSM) is computed by them. Then using a height criterion, rough and smooth regions of the DDSM are found. Then last pulse points lying inside smooth regions are filtered using a simplified Sohn filtering method to find the so called on-terrain points by which the Digital Terrain Model (i.e. DTM) is generated.