Geometry and Topology Reconstruction of BIM Wall Objects from Photogrammetric Meshes and Laser Point Clouds

Abstract

As the foundation for digitalization, building information modeling (BIM) technology has been widely used in the field of architecture, engineering, construction, and facility management (AEC/FM). Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) oblique photogrammetry and laser scanning have become increasingly popular data acquisition techniques for surveying buildings and providing original data for BIM modeling. However, the geometric and topological reconstruction of solid walls, which are among the most important architectural structures in BIM, is still a challenging undertaking. Due to noise and missing data in 3D point clouds, current research mostly focuses on segmenting wall planar surfaces from unstructured 3D point clouds and fitting the plane parameters without considering the thickness or 3D shape of the wall. Point clouds acquired only from the indoor space are insufficient for modeling exterior walls. It is also important to maintain the topological relationships between wall objects to meet the needs of complex BIM modeling. Therefore, in this study, a geometry and topology modeling method is proposed for solid walls in BIM based on photogrammetric meshes and laser point clouds. The method uses a kinetic space-partitioning algorithm to generate the building footprint and indoor floor plan. It classifies interior and exterior wall segments and infers parallel line segments to extract wall centerlines. The topological relationships are reconstructed and maintained to build wall objects with consistency. Experimental results on two datasets, including both photogrammetric meshes and indoor laser point clouds, exhibit more than 90% completeness and correctness, as well as centimeter-level accuracy of the wall surfaces.