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

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.