An overview of constructing geometric models of buildings using point clouds

Building Information Modelling (BIM) and the associated numerical simulations have widely been recognised as useful components of building design support tools, and are readily applied in the design and the construction of new buildings. Meanwhile, their applications in existing buildings are often constrained by the lack of as-built geometric models, the generation of which often depends on two aspects: the spatial data (e.g., point cloud data) representing the building of interest and the means of constructing geometric models using the spatial data. The former can readily be obtained using laser scanning techniques. However, the generation of geometric models is mainly a manual process in practice, which is often time consuming. To improve the efficiency, extensive research has been carried out to investigate approaches for automating the geometric modelling process and improving the quality of the models obtained. This article provides a review of the approaches and the tools available in the literature for generating geometric models of buildings using point cloud data. The strengths and weaknesses of those approaches and the potential benefits of combining some of them are critically discussed.