LOD2 building generation - experiences and comparisons

The VOLTA project is a RISE Marie-Curie action designed to realize Research & Innovation (R&I) among intersectoral partners to exchange knowledge, methods and workflows in the geospatial field. To accomplish its objectives, the main R&I activities of VOLTA are divided in four interlinked Work Packages with two transversal ones responsible for knowledge transfer & training as well as dissemination of the project results. The research activities and knowledge transfer are performed with a series of secondments between partners. The consortium is composed of 13 partners from academic & research institutions, industrial partners and national mapping agencies. The Romanian National Center of Cartography is part of this research project and in this article the achievements of the secondment at Bruno Kessler Foundation in Trento (Italy) are given. The main goal of the exchange was to generate level of detail - LOD2 building models in an automated manner from photogrammetric point clouds and without any ancillary data. To benchmark existing commercial solutions for the realization of LOD2 building models, we tested Building Reconstruction. This program generates LOD2 models starting from building footprints, digital terrain model (DTM) and digital surface model (DSM). The presented work examined a research and a commercial-based approach to reconstruct LOD2 building models from point clouds. The full paper will report all technical details of the work with insight analyses and comparisons.