Segmentation of Façades from Urban 3D Point Clouds Using Geometrical and Morphological Attribute-Based Operators

3D building segmentation is an important research issue in the remote sensing community with relevant applications to urban modeling, cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-model registration, 3D cartography, virtual reality, cultural heritage documentation, among others. In this paper, we propose automatic, parametric and robust approaches to segment façades from 3D point clouds. Processing is carried out using elevation images and 3D decomposition, and the final result can be reprojected onto the 3D point cloud for visualization or evaluation purposes. Our methods are based on geometrical and geodesic constraints. Parameters are related to urban and architectural constraints. Thus, they can be set up to manage façades of any height, length and elongation. We propose two methods based on façade marker extraction and a third method without markers based on the maximal elongation image. This work is developed in the framework of TerraMobilita project. The performance of our methods is proved in our experiments on TerraMobilita databases using 2D and 3D ground truth annotations.