Fusion of laser scanning data, maps, and aerial photographs for building reconstruction

Point clouds generated by airborne laser scanners, aerial photographs, and two-dimensional maps with building outlines are all valuable data sources for the reconstruction of three-dimensional models of buildings. This paper reviews the advantages of utilizing maps and analyzes the different strategies that are taken for fusing the map data with either laser scanner data or aerial photographs. Data fusion is shown to be useful in reducing the complexity of the reconstruction problem, but insufficient to allow a completely automatic building reconstruction.