Building Change Detection in Airborne Laser Scanning and Dense Image Matching Point Clouds Using a Residual Neural Network

National Mapping Agencies (NMAs) acquire nation-wide point cloud data from Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) sensors as well as using Dense Image Matching (DIM) on aerial images. As these datasets are often captured years apart, they contain implicit information about changes in the real world. While detecting changes within point clouds is not a new topic per se, detecting changes in point clouds from different sensors, which consequently have different point densities, point distributions and characteristics, is still an on-going problem. As such, we approach this task using a residual neural network, which detects building changes using height and class information on a raster level. In the experiments, we show that this approach is capable of detecting building changes automatically and reliably independent of the given point clouds and for various building sizes achieving mean F1-Scores of 80.5% and 79.8% for ALS-ALS and ALS-DIM point clouds on an object-level and F1-Scores of 91.1% and 86.3% on a raster-level, respectively.