Patent ID: 8884962

Claim:
A method of aligning building block footprint data and laser samples, comprising: accessing stored location data associated with a building block footprint originating from a first source; accessing a plurality of stored sweeps of laser samples originating from a second source, each sweep of laser samples being oriented perpendicular to the earth plane and having locations associated with the reflection of a laser beam against a solid object and relative to one of a plurality of geo-reference points; selecting a subset of the laser samples for each of the stored sweeps relating to a façade of the building block footprint; projecting the locations associated with the subset for each of the stored sweeps of laser samples to the earth plane to obtain a plurality of estimated edge points of the façade of the building block footprint; calculating a shift vector for each estimated edge point that when applied, shift the estimated edge points to coincide with the portion of the building block footprint data representative of the façade, wherein the shift vector is a vector projected from the estimated edge point to the nearest point on the building block footprint edge; and using said shift vectors to align the laser sample location data to the building block footprint location data.