L2M-Reg: Building-level Uncertainty-aware Registration of Outdoor LiDAR Point Clouds and Semantic 3D City Models

Abstract: Accurate registration between LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) point clouds and semantic 3D city models is a fundamental topic in urban digital twinning and a prerequisite for downstream tasks, such as digital construction, change detection and model refinement. However, achieving accurate LiDAR-to-Model registration at individual building level remains challenging, particularly due to the generalization uncertainty in semantic 3D city models at the Level of Detail 2 (LoD2). This paper addresses this gap by proposing L2M-Reg, a plane-based fine registration method that explicitly accounts for model uncertainty. L2M-Reg consists of three key steps: establishing reliable plane correspondence, building a pseudo-plane-constrained Gauss-Helmert model, and adaptively estimating vertical translation. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that L2M-Reg is both more accurate and computationally efficient than existing ICP-based and plane-based methods. Overall, L2M-Reg provides a novel building-level solution regarding LiDAR-to-Model registration when model uncertainty is present.