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Free multi-floor indoor space extraction from complex 3D building models

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Abstract

Intelligent navigation and facility management in complex indoor environments are issues at the forefront of geospatial information science. Indoor spaces with fine geometric and semantic descriptions provide a solid foundation for various indoor applications, but it is difficult to comprehensively extract free multi-floor indoor spaces from complex three-dimensional building models, such as those described using CityGML LoD4, with existing methods for the subdivision or extraction of indoor spaces based on vector topology processing. Therefore, this paper elaborates a new voxel-based approach for extracting free multi-floor indoor spaces from 3D building models. It transforms the complicated vector processing tasks into a simple raster process that consists of three steps: voxelization with semantic enhancement, voxel classification, and boundary extraction. Experiments illustrate that the proposed method can automatically and correctly extract free multi-floor indoor spaces, especially two typical kinds of open indoor spaces, namely, lobbies and staircases.

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Acknowledgments

This paper was supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China (No. 41571390, 41471320, and 41471332) and the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (2015AA123901).

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Correspondence to Zhiqiang Du.

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Communicated by: H. A. Babaie

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Xiong, Q., Zhu, Q., Du, Z. et al. Free multi-floor indoor space extraction from complex 3D building models. Earth Sci Inform 10, 69–83 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12145-016-0279-x

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