Quality analysis on 3D building models reconstructed from airborne laser scanning data

This paper presents a method to assess the geometric quality of 3D building models. The quality depends on properties of the input data and the processing steps. Insight in the quality of 3D models is important for users to judge whether the models can be used in their specific applications. Without a proper quality description it is likely that the building models are either treated as correct or considered as useless because the quality is unknown. In our research we analyse how the quality parameters of the input data affect the quality of the 3D models. The 3D models have been reconstructed from dense airborne laser scanner data of about 20 pts/m(2). A target based graph matching approach has been used to relate specific data features to general building knowledge. The paper presents a theoretical and an empirical approach to identify strong parts and shortcomings in 3D building models reconstructed from airborne laser scanning data without the use of reference measurements. Our method is tested on three different scenes to show that a proper quality description is essential to correctly judge the quality of the models. (C) 2011 International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Inc. (ISPRS). Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.