Horizontal plane detection from 3D point clouds of buildings

The detection of the horizontal plane or its normal direction is important in the processing of 3D point clouds of buildings. Generally, the horizontal plane is detected from clues of vanishing points of visual images or from the border detection of 3D point data. However, these methods are not fit for most building structures of various kinds. Presented is a novel detection method to extract directly the horizontal plane from 3D point clouds of buildings. Experimental results demonstrate that the method is simple and robust.