Methodology

Processing architecture for the Boulder pilot: public address, parcel and roofprint geometry combined with airborne LiDAR, reconstructed into planar roof surfaces and measured in a projected coordinate system.

STEP 01

Address

Boulder County address points

STEP 02

Parcel

Boulder County parcel geometry lookup

STEP 03

Building roofprint

DRCOG 2024 planimetrics roofprints

STEP 04

USGS 3DEP LiDAR

Point cloud subset retrieval

STEP 05

Point cloud processing

Filtering, classification, thinning

STEP 06

Planar reconstruction

Roof surface fitting

STEP 07

3D roof model

LoD2 geometry assembly

STEP 08

Topology classification

Ridge / hip / valley / eave / rake

STEP 09

Measurements

Areas, pitch, azimuth, lengths

STEP 10

Report

Measurement document

Point cloud processing

The 3DEP tile subset covering the roofprint is clipped, classified and thinned before reconstruction.

Ground and vegetation returns removed from roof observations

Point density reported per property for QA

Processing performed in a projected CRS, not lat/long

Planar reconstruction

Roof surfaces are fitted as planes constrained by the roofprint boundary, following the Roofer / 3DBAG approach.

Plane count is data-driven, not assumed

Fit residuals recorded per plane as RMSE

Surfaces below a minimum area threshold are merged

Topology and measurement

Plane adjacency produces the edge graph, which is then classified and measured.

Ridge, hip, valley, eave and rake derived from plane relationships

Ambiguous edges are reported as unclassified

Areas are 3D surface areas, not projected footprints

Known limits

The pilot depends on public data vintage and density; limitations are surfaced rather than hidden.

LiDAR acquired 2020 — later construction is not represented

Occlusion and low density reduce reliability on small surfaces

Imagery layer is supplied by a configured provider

About this pilot

SmartRoof is a geospatial engineering prototype built by CCK Group. It covers Boulder, Colorado and runs entirely on public data: USGS 3DEP LiDAR, DRCOG planimetrics and Boulder County parcel and address records. Every measurement on this site was produced by the pipeline described above — none of it is entered by hand.