An Open Source Ransac-Based Plug-In for Unsupervised Building Roof Extraction from LiDAR Point Clouds

This work presents a Plug-In for the Opticks open source soft-ware implementing an unsupervised workflow for building roof extraction from Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data. In particular, a computer vision approach is employed to segment the points belonging to different objects (buildings, trees, etc.), whereas the RANSAC algorithm, the core of the proposed workflow, is used recursively for identifying the buildings and to model their roofs. The preliminary re-sults, qualitatively evaluated, are encouraging: the proposed roof extraction workflow works generally well-the 80% of the roofs are completely or partially modeled-but shows some issues with buildings characterized by several pitches with low slopes and/or located in proximity of dense vegetation.