{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,28]],"date-time":"2026-02-28T17:54:18Z","timestamp":1772301258110,"version":"3.50.1"},"reference-count":45,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"5","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2022,3,5]],"date-time":"2022-03-05T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1646438400000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Remote Sensing"],"abstract":"<jats:p>The recent popularization of airborne lidar scanners has provided a steady source of point cloud datasets containing the altitudes of bare earth surface and vegetation features as well as man-made structures. In contrast to terrestrial lidar, which produces dense point clouds of small areas, airborne laser sensors usually deliver sparse datasets that cover large municipalities. The latter are very useful in constructing digital representations of cities; however, reconstructing 3D building shapes from a sparse point cloud is a time-consuming process because automatic shape reconstruction methods work best with dense point clouds and usually cannot be applied for this purpose. Moreover, existing methods dedicated to reconstructing simplified 3D buildings from sparse point clouds are optimized for detecting simple building shapes, and they exhibit problems when dealing with more complex structures such as towers, spires, and large ornamental features, which are commonly found e.g., in buildings from the renaissance era. In the above context, this paper proposes a novel method of reconstructing 3D building shapes from sparse point clouds. The proposed algorithm has been optimized to work with incomplete point cloud data in order to provide a cost-effective way of generating representative 3D city models. The algorithm has been tested on lidar point clouds representing buildings in the city of Gdansk, Poland.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/rs14051278","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2022,3,6]],"date-time":"2022-03-06T20:40:02Z","timestamp":1646599202000},"page":"1278","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":14,"title":["A Cost-Effective Method for Reconstructing City-Building 3D Models from Sparse Lidar Point Clouds"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"14","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-7841-3855","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Marek","family":"Kulawiak","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Geoinformatics, Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics, Gdansk University of Technology, 80-233 Gdansk, Poland"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2022,3,5]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","first-page":"367","article-title":"Remote sensing and city information modeling for revealing the complexity of historical centers","volume":"46","author":"Galizia","year":"2021","journal-title":"Int. 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