Direct Analysis on Point Clouds: Geomatics Syntesis Project 2019

With the rapid growth in point cloud acquisition technologies the recent years we have the ability to measure large quantities of 3D points of significantly detailed and geometrically composite scenes such as urban environments. This advantage can be exploited and used for direct analysis on point clouds. A direct point cloud analysis has several advantages over for example 3D surface reconstruction, such as the end result having more details and the computation being less expensive. In order to make a point cloud representation a suitable alternative for other types of 3D city models, they need to be semantically enriched, resulting in a rich point cloud. One element of this enrichment is the detection of objects, such as windows. Extracting these from facades is specifically what this research revolves around, which can be done by taking advantage of the fact that they show up as holes, since lasers of the point cloud scanner do not properly reflect on them. Two different general approaches are taken to detect windows in a by mobile laser scanner obtained point cloud of Noordereiland, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.