Delineation of the Hostilities’ Impact on Urban Environment by LiDAR Data Processing (a Case Study of Kharkiv)

Our paper presents an approach for extracting buildings (BE-technique) and detecting changes (CD-technique) in urban morphology, using multitemporal LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) point clouds. This approach can be especially useful for monitoring urban areas that have been affected by military impact. The paper demonstrates the relevant application for the city of Kharkiv, Ukraine, which has suffered from the hostilities caused by the Russian aggression. Our research uses an application of a novel stand-alone package, that reconstructs the urban environment from Airborne LiDAR data. The software employs calibrated models that have been tested on Kharkiv, with a LiDAR survey in 2019 as the primary dataset, and on two districts of Tallinn, Estonia, with LiDAR surveys in 2017 and 2022 as primary and secondary datasets, correspondingly. Our research also refers to a site survey completed in Fall 2022 as to a secondary dataset of Kharkiv, so that to identify the features of the military impact on residential buildings. The paper visualizes the spatial patterns of urban changes in these three selected sites then. Key geometric values of the featured changes (area of footprint, volume of polyhedron, weighted height) were analyzed by the descriptive statistics and statistical data analysis in Wolfram Mathematica. This research effort may be highly valuable for the post-war recovery of the city of Kharkiv.