Procedural reconstruction of 3D indoor models from lidar data using reversible jump Markov Chain Monte Carlo

Abstract

Automated reconstruction of Building Information Models (BIMs) from point clouds has been an intensive and challenging research topic for decades. Traditionally, 3D models of indoor environments are reconstructed purely by data-driven methods, which are susceptible to erroneous and incomplete data. Procedural-based methods such as the shape grammar are more robust to uncertainty and incompleteness of the data as they exploit the regularity and repetition of structural elements and architectural design principles in the reconstruction. Nevertheless, these methods are often limited to simple architectural styles: the so-called Manhattan design. In this paper, we propose a new method based on a combination of a shape grammar and a data-driven process for procedural modelling of indoor environments from a point cloud. The core idea behind the integration is to apply a stochastic process based on reversible jump Markov Chain Monte Carlo (rjMCMC) to guide the automated application of grammar rules in the derivation of a 3D indoor model. Experiments on synthetic and real data sets show the applicability of the method to efficiently generate 3D indoor models of both Manhattan and non-Manhattan environments with high accuracy, completeness, and correctness.