On the Determination of Building Footprints from LIDAR Data

A new approach to improve the determination of building boundaries through automatic processing of light detection and ranging (LIDAR) data is presented. The LIDAR data is processed and interpolated into a grayscale image of intensity values corresponding to height measurements. Ground measurements are separated from non-ground measurements by using a progressive morphological filter. With these measurements now distinct, further separation of non-ground measurements into building and non-building measurements is performed by growing regions with similar characteristics. These building areas are then refined, resulting in a ground plan representation of building boundaries, known as building footprints. Several algorithms are then implemented to clean these footprints. A new method is developed to analyze actual known satellite imagery in order to confirm identified building footprints