A service-oriented indoor point cloud processing pipeline

Abstract

Visualization of point clouds plays an important role in understanding the context of the digital representation of the built environment. Modern commodity mobile devices (e.g., smartphones and tablets), are capable of capturing representations in the form of 3D point clouds, with their depth-sensing and photogrammetry capabilities. Points clouds enable the encoding of important spatial and physical features of the built environment they represent. However, once captured, point clouds need to be processed before they can be used for further semantic enrichment and decision making. An integrated pipeline for such processes is crucial for use in larger and more complex enterprise systems and data analysis platforms, especially within the realm of Facility Management (FM) and Real Estate 4.0. We present and discuss a prototypical implementation for a service-oriented point cloud processing pipeline. The presented processing features focus on detecting and visualizing spatial deviations between as-is versus as-designed representations. We discuss the design and implementation of these processing features, and present experimental results. The presented approach can be used as a lightweight software component for processing indoor point clouds captured using commodity mobile devices, as well as primary deviation analysis, and also provides a processing link for further semantic enrichment of base-data for Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Digital Twin (DT) applications.