Automatic extraction of salient geometric entities from LIDAR point clouds

This paper introduces a modularized tool for the processing of LIDAR data based on the analysis of neighbor relationships between LIDAR points with the goal to extract planes, lines, and points in 3D. The tool's functionalities will be exemplified by the application of reconstructing building roofs. Detecting buildings within digital surface models is one further step to enhance the results of fully- and semi-automatic software tools which handle huge LIDAR point clouds. The functionalities comprise the sorting of point coordinates to improve efficiency, the retrieval of LIDAR point topology by triangulation of points, the extraction of 3D planes by "plane growing" and the determination of lines, points and roof outlines based on the 3D planes by statistical estimation and hypothesis testing of their parameters.