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Three-dimensional (3-D) reconstruction of building roofs can be an essential prerequisite for 3-D building change detection, which is important for detection of informal buildings or extensions and for update of 3-D map database. However, automatic 3-D roof reconstruction from the remote sensing data is still in its development stage for a number of reasons. For instance, there are difficulties in determining the neighbourhood relationships among the planes on a complex building roof, locating the step edges from point cloud data often requires additional information or may impose constraints, and missing roof planes attract human interaction and often produces high reconstruction errors. This research introduces a new 3-D roof reconstruction technique that constructs an adjacency matrix to define the topological relationships among the roof planes. It identifies any missing planes through an analysis using the 3-D plane intersection lines between adjacent planes. Then, it generates new planes to fill gaps of missing planes. Finally, it obtains complete building models through insertion of approximate wall planes and building floor. The reported research in this paper then uses the generated building models to detect 3-D changes in buildings. Plane connections between neighbouring planes are first defined to establish relationships between neighbouring planes. Then, each building in the reference and test model sets is represented using a graph data structure. Finally, the height intensity images, and if required the graph representations, of the reference and test models are directly compared to find and categorise 3-D changes into five groups: new, unchanged, demolished, modified and partially-modified planes. Experimental results on two Australian datasets show high object- and pixel-based accuracy in terms of completeness, correctness, and quality for both 3-D roof reconstruction and change detection techniques. The proposed change detection technique is robust to various changes including addition of a new veranda to or removal of an existing veranda from a building and increase of the height of a building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of robust and accurate methods for automatic building detection and regularisation using multisource data continues to be a challenge due to point cloud sparsity, high spectral variability, urban objects differences, surrounding complexity, and data misalignment. To address these challenges, constraints on object’s size, height, area, and orientation are generally benefited which adversely affect the detection performance. Often the buildings either small in size, under shadows or partly occluded are ousted during elimination of superfluous objects. To overcome the limitations, a methodology is developed to extract and regularise the buildings using features from point cloud and orthoimagery. The building delineation process is carried out by identifying the candidate building regions and segmenting them into grids. Vegetation elimination, building detection and extraction of their partially occluded parts are achieved by synthesising the point cloud and image data. Finally, the detected buildings are regularised by exploiting the image lines in the building regularisation process. Detection and regularisation processes have been evaluated using the ISPRS benchmark and four Australian data sets which differ in point density (1 to 29 points/m2), building sizes, shadows, terrain, and vegetation. Results indicate that there is 83% to 93% per-area completeness with the correctness of above 95%, demonstrating the robustness of the approach. The absence of over- and many-to-many segmentation errors in the ISPRS data set indicate that the technique has higher per-object accuracy. While compared with six existing similar methods, the proposed detection and regularisation approach performs significantly better on more complex data sets (Australian) in contrast to the ISPRS benchmark, where it does better or equal to the counterparts.