COMPARISON OF ALGORITHMS FOR CONSTRUCTION DETECTION USING AIRBORNE LASER SCANNING AND NDSM CLASSIFICATION

Traditional approach to classify the point cloud of airborne laser scanning is based on the processing of a normalized digital surface model (nDSM), when ground facilities are detected and classified. The main feature to detect a ground facility is height difference between adjacent points. The simplest method to extract a ground facility is region-growing algorithm, which applies threshold to identify the connection between two points. Region growing algorithm is working with the constant value of height difference. Therefore, it is not applicable due to diverse conditions of earth surface, when height difference must be defined for each region separately. As result, researchers propose hierarchical, statistical and cluster methods to solve this problem. The study goal is to compare four algorithms to generate nDSM: region growing, progressive morphological filter, adaptive TIN surfaces and graph-cut. The experiment is divided into two stages: 1) to calculate the number of detected and lost buildings in nDSM; 2) to measure the classification accuracy of extracted shapes. The experiment results have showed that progressive morphological filter and graph-cut provides the minimal loss of buildings (only 1%). The most effective algorithm for ground facility detection is the graph-cut (total accuracy 0.95, Cohen’s Kappa 0.89, F1 score 0.93)