AUTOMATED BIM ENTITY RECONSTRUCTION FROM UNSTRUCTURED 3D POINTCLOUDS

Abstract

Laser scanning is used widely in architecture and construction to document existing buildings by providing accurate data for creating a 3D model. The output is a set of data points in space, so-called point cloud. While point clouds can be directly rendered and inspected, they do not hold any semantics. Typically, engineers manually obtain floor plans, structural models, or the whole BIM model, which is a very time-consuming task for large building projects. In this contribution, we present the design and concept of a PointCloud2BIM library [1]. It provides a set of algorithms for automated or user assisted detection of fundamental entities from scanned point cloud data sets, such as floors, rooms, walls, and openings, and identification of the mutual relationships between them. The entity detection is based on a reasonable degree of human interaction (i.e., expected wall thickness). The results reside in a platform-agnostic JSON database allowing future integration into any existing BIM software.