Automatic Detection of Buildings and Changes in Buildings for Updating of Maps

There is currently high interest in developing automated methods to assist the updating of map databases. This study presents methods for automatic detection of buildings and changes in buildings from airborne laser scanner and digital aerial image data and shows the potential usefulness of the methods with thorough experiments in a 5 km(2) suburban study area. 96% of buildings larger than 60 m(2) were correctly detected in the building detection. The completeness and correctness of the change detection for buildings larger than 60 m(2) were about 85% (including five classes). Most of the errors occurred in small or otherwise problematic buildings.