Automatic Geometry Generation from Point Clouds for BIM

The need for better 3D documentation of the built environment has come to the fore in recent years, led primarily by city modelling at the large scale and Building Information Modelling (BIM) at the smaller scale. Automation is seen as desirable as it removes the time-consuming and therefore costly amount of human intervention in the process of model generation. BIM is the focus of this paper as not only is there a commercial need, as will be shown by the number of commercial solutions, but also wide research interest due to the aspiration of automated 3D models from both Geomatics and Computer Science communities. The aim is to go beyond the current labour-intensive tracing of the point cloud to an automated process that produces geometry that is both open and more verifiable. This work investigates what can be achieved today with automation through both literature review and by proposing a novel point cloud processing process. We present an automated workflow for the generation of BIM data from 3D point clouds. We also present quality indicators for reconstructed geometry elements and a framework in which to assess the quality of the reconstructed geometry against a reference.