Unlocking point cloud potential: fusing mls point clouds with semantic 3d building models while considering uncertainty

Abstract. Throughout the years, semantic 3D city models have been created to depict 3D spatial phenomenon. Recently, an increasing number of mobile laser scanning (MLS) units yield terrestrial point clouds at an unprecedented level. Both dataset types often depict the same 3D spatial phenomenon differently, thus their fusion should increase the quality of the captured 3D spatial phenomenon. Yet, each dataset has modality-dependent uncertainties that hinder their immediate fusion. Therefore, we present a method for fusing MLS point clouds with semantic 3D building models while considering uncertainty issues. Specifically, we show MLS point clouds coregistration with semantic 3D building models based on expert confidence in evaluated metadata quantified by confidence interval (CI). This step leads to the dynamic adjustment of the CI, which is used to delineate matching bounds for both datasets. Both coregistration and matching steps serve as priors for a Bayesian network (BayNet) that performs application-dependent identity estimation. The BayNet propagates uncertainties and beliefs throughout the process to estimate end probabilities for confirmed, unmodeled, and other city objects. We conducted promising preliminary experiments on urban MLS and CityGML datasets. Our strategy sets up a framework for the fusion of MLS point clouds and semantic 3D building models. This framework aids the challenging parallel usage of such datasets in applications such as facade refinement or change detection. To further support this process, we open-sourced our implementation.