Topology Reconstruction of BIM Wall Objects from Point Cloud Data

Abstract

The processing of remote sensing measurements to Building Information Modeling (BIM) is a popular subject in current literature. An important step in the process is the enrichment of the geometry with the topology of the wall observations to create a logical model. However, this remains an unsolved task as methods struggle to deal with the noise, incompleteness and the complexity of point cloud data of building scenes. Current methods impose severe abstractions such as Manhattan-world assumptions and single-story procedures to overcome these obstacles, but as a result, a general data processing approach is still missing. In this paper, we propose a method that solves these shortcomings and creates a logical BIM model in an unsupervised manner. More specifically, we propose a connection evaluation framework that takes as input a set of preprocessed point clouds of a building’s wall observations and compute the best fit topology between them. We transcend the current state of the art by processing point clouds of both straight, curved and polyline-based walls. Also, we consider multiple connection types in a novel reasoning framework that decides which operations are best fit to reconstruct the topology of the walls. The geometry and topology produced by our method is directly usable by BIM processes as it is structured conform the IFC data structure. The experimental results conducted on the Stanford 2D-3D-Semantics dataset (2D-3D-S) show that the proposed method is a promising framework to reconstruct complex multi-story wall elements in an unsupervised manner.