From Geometry to Function: A Multi-Task LiDAR Benchmark Dataset for Semantic and Functional Parsing of Urban Facades

Globally consistent semantic digital twins require centimeter-accurate and geographically transferable 3D facade segmentation. However, progress in facade parsing is limited by the lack of large-scale, standardized benchmarks for evaluating cross-domain generalization. Existing datasets are geographically narrow, semantically inconsistent, or insufficiently precise. We introduce UnderOneFacade, the largest cross-country and cross-continent 3D facade benchmark to date, comprising centimeter-accurate point clouds with hierarchical, harmonized, and architecturally grounded semantic labels totaling 2.7 billion annotated points. Through a systematic evaluation of representative point-, graph- and transformer-based architectures, we show that current methods struggle to recognize fine-grained architectural elements and degrade significantly across geographic domains, with the best models achieving only up to 33 IoU on the fine-grained LoFG3 benchmark. By combining geometric precision with standardized semantics at unprecedented scale, UnderOneFacade establishes a rigorous benchmark for developing robust and transferable 3D segmentation models. The dataset, evaluation scripts, and pretrained models will be released upon publication.

This paper presents an end-to-end, agent-driven pipeline for the LoD3 reconstruction of facade openings in 3D city models, producing directly usable CityGML-conform outputs. In contrast to existing approaches that rely on supervised semantic segmentation and therefore require large amounts of manually annotated training data, the proposed method employs a zero-shot segmentation strategy. This substantially reduces the annotation effort while still achieving strong performance in our benchmark on the eTRIMS dataset. A further key contribution is the enforcement of correct partonomic hierarchies, thereby producing CityGML-conform LoD3 building models. Beyond the reconstruction pipeline itself, this work also introduces a novel evaluation metric for facade reconstruction, termed Facade Feature Distance (FFD). Unlike conventional metrics such as mIoU or FRDS, which assess similarity primarily through pixel-wise overlap, FFD measures distance in a high-level feature space derived from a vision transformer. In doing so, it captures both semantic correctness and architectural layout, providing a more suitable assessment of facade reconstruction quality. The proposed pipeline and evaluation strategy together offer a practical and scalable contribution toward the automated generation and analysis of semantically enriched 3D city models. The developed code is published at: https://github.com/hcu-cml/citydb-SVI2LoD3-ai.

We present the P$^3$ dataset, a large-scale multimodal benchmark for building vectorization, constructed from aerial LiDAR point clouds, high-resolution aerial imagery, and vectorized 2D building outlines, collected across three continents. The dataset contains over 10 billion LiDAR points with decimeter-level accuracy and RGB images at a ground sampling distance of 25 centimeter. While many existing datasets primarily focus on the image modality, P$^3$ offers a complementary perspective by also incorporating dense 3D information. We demonstrate that LiDAR point clouds serve as a robust modality for predicting building polygons, both in hybrid and end-to-end learning frameworks. Moreover, fusing aerial LiDAR and imagery further improves accuracy and geometric quality of predicted polygons. The P$^3$ dataset is publicly available, along with code and pretrained weights of three state-of-the-art models for building polygon prediction at https://github.com/raphaelsulzer/PixelsPointsPolygons .