Extraction of Vertical Walls from Mobile Laser Scanning Data for Solar Potential Assessment

In recent years there has been an increasing demand among home owners for cost effective sustainable energy production such as solar energy to provide heating and electricity. A lot of research has focused on the assessment of the incoming solar radiation on roof planes acquired by, e.g., Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS). However, solar panels can also be mounted on building facades in order to increase renewable energy supply. Due to limited reflections of points from vertical walls, ALS data is not suitable to perform solar potential assessment of vertical building facades. This paper focuses on a new method for automatic solar radiation modeling of facades acquired by Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) and uses the full 3D information of the point cloud for both the extraction of vertical walls covered by the survey and solar potential analysis. Furthermore, a new method is introduced determining the interior and exterior face, respectively, of each detected wall in order to calculate its slope and aspect angles that are of crucial importance for solar potential assessment. Shadowing effects of nearby objects are considered by computing the 3D horizon of each point of a facade segment within the 3D point cloud.