CityJSON Building Generation from Airborne LiDAR 3D Point Clouds

Abstract

The relevant insights provided by 3D City models greatly improve Smart Cities and their management policies. In the urban built environment, buildings frequently represent the most studied and modeled features. CityJSON format proposes a lightweight and developer-friendly alternative to CityGML. This paper proposes an improvement to the usability of 3D models providing an automatic generation method in CityJSON, to ensure compactness, expressivity, and interoperability. In addition to a compliance rate in excess of 92% for geometry and topology, the generated model allows the handling of contextual information, such as metadata and refined levels of details (LoD), in a built-in manner. By breaking down the building-generation process, it creates consistent building objects from the unique source of Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) point clouds.