This study proposes a sequence of procedures to extract building boundaries and planar patches through segmentation of rasterized lidar data. Although previous approaches to building extraction have been shown satisfactory, there still exist needs to increase the degree of automation. The methodologies proposed in this study are as follows: Firstly, lidar data are rasterized into grid form in order to exploit its rapid access to neighboring elevations and image operations. Secondly, propagation of errors in raw data is taken into account for in assessing the quality of gradients-driven properties and further in choosing suitable parameters. Thirdly, extraction of planar patches is conducted through a sequence of processes: histogram analysis, least squares fitting, and region merging. Experimental results show that the geometric components of building models could be extracted by the proposed approach in a streamlined way.