Urban Thematic Mapping by Integrating LiDAR Point Cloud with Colour Imagery

This paper presents an effective approach to integrating airborne lidar data and colour imagery acquired simultaneously for urban mapping. Texture and height information extracted from lidar point cloud is integrated with spectral channels of aerial imagery into an image segmentation process. Then, the segmented polygons are integrated with the extracted geometric features (height information between first- and lastreturn, eigenvalue-based local variation and filtered height data) and spectral features (line segments) into a supervised classifier. The results for two different urban areas in Toronto, Canada, demonstrated that a satisfactory overall accuracy of 84.96% and Kappa of 0.76 were achieved in Scene I, while a building detection rate of 92.11%, comission error of 2.10% and omission error of 9.25% were obtained in Scene II.