MIN-CUT BASED SEMANTIC BUILDING LABELING FOR AIRBORNE LIDAR DATA

Abstract. Classification and segmentation of buildings from airborne lidar point clouds commonly involve point features calculated within a local neighborhood. The relative change of the features in the immediate surrounding of each point as well as the spatial relationships between neighboring points also need to be examined to account for spatial coherence. In this study we formulate the point labeling problem under a global graph-cut optimization solution. We construct the energy function through a graph representing a Markov Random Field (MRF). The solution to the labeling problem is obtained by finding the minimum-cut on this graph. We have employed this framework for three different labeling tasks on airborne lidar point clouds. Ground filtering, building classification, and roof-plane segmentation. As a follow-up study on our previous ground filtering work, this paper examines our building extraction approach on two airborne lidar datasets with different point densities containing approximately 930K points in one dataset and 750K points in the other. Test results for building vs. non-building point labeling show a 97.9% overall accuracy with a kappa value of 0.91 for the dataset with 1.18 pts/m2 average point density and a 96.8% accuracy with a kappa value of 0.90 for the dataset with 8.83 pts/m2 average point density. We can achieve 91.2% overall average accuracy in roof plane segmentation with respect to the reference segmentation of 20 building roofs involving 74 individual roof planes. In summary, the presented framework can successfully label points in airborne lidar point clouds with different characteristics for all three labeling problems we have introduced. It is robust to noise in the calculated features due to the use of global optimization. Furthermore, the framework achieves these results with a small training sample size.