Remote sensing techniques for building models and energy performance studies of buildings

Setting up building and district models to perform energetic simulations requires detailed information about the existing buildings. For large parts of the building stock accurate plans are missing, incomplete or outdated. Therefore, gathering the required information is a time consuming and expensive task. Remote sensing techniques provide us with fast and increasingly cheap tools to obtain important input data for building and district models. Obtaining geometric information of buildings for whole districts with a resolution of few cm is already state of the art. However, new developments in sensor technology and data processing tools allow us to go significantly beyond this. We can extract facade elements, determine building materials, and estimate heat flows through building envelopes for complete districts. Current developments point towards an even more detailed, quantitative determination of the outer and inner structure of building envelopes and their physical characteristics. These methods use new RGB, infrared, and hyperspectral camera systems, ground- and satellite-based microwave sensing, and combined analyses with various sensors. The rapid developments and decreasing prices for sensors and their carriers (e.g. UAS) make our approaches attractive for practical use. In this paper we provide a review of recent techniques and their application on the building stock at the single-building and district scale. We also give an overview of new developments and an outlook to the future.