Spectral clustering of straight-line segments for roof plane extraction from airborne LiDAR point clouds

This letter presents a novel approach to automated extraction of roof planes from airborne light detection and ranging data based on spectral clustering of straight-line segments. The straight-line segments are derived from laser scan lines, and 3-D line geometry analysis is employed to identify coplanar line segments so as to avoid skew lines in plane estimation. Spectral analysis reveals the spectrum of the adjacency matrix formed by the straight-line segments. Spectral clustering is then performed in feature space where the clusters are more prominent, resulting in a more robust extraction of roof planes. The proposed approach has been tested on ISPRS benchmark data sets, with the results showing high quality in terms of completeness, correctness, and geometrical accuracy, thus confirming that the proposed approach can extract roof planes both accurately and efficiently