Automated Matching of Segmented Point Clouds to As-built Plans

Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) is seeing an increase use for surveying and engineering applications. As such, there is much on-going research into automating the process for segmentation and feature extraction. This paper presents a simple method for segmenting the interior of a building and comparing it to as-built plans. The method is based on analysing the local point attributes such as curvature, surface normal direction and underlying geometric structure. Random sampling consensus (RANSAC), region growing and voting techniques are applied to identify the predominant salient surface feature to extract wall and vertical segments. This information is used to generate a 2D plan of the interior space. A distance weighted method then automatically locates the corresponding vertices between the different datasets to transform them into a common coordinate system.A traditional survey was performed alongside the 3D point cloudcapture to compare and validate the generated 2D plans and the comparison to the existingdrawings. The accuracy of such generated plans from 3D point clouds will be explored

Reconstrucción digital de estructuras de tejados históricos: desarrollo de un flujo de trabajo de análisis altamente automatizado

[EN] Planning on adaptive reuse, maintenance and restoration of historic timber structuresrequiresextensive architectural and structural analysis of the actual condition. Current methods for a modellingof roof constructions consist of several manual steps including the time-consuming dimensional modelling. The continuous development of terrestrial laser scanners increases the accuracy, comfort and speed of the surveying work inroof constructions. Resultingpoint clouds enabledetailed visualisation of theconstructionsrepresented by single points or polygonal meshes, but in fact donot containinformation about the structural system and the beam elements. The developed workflow containsseveral processing steps on the point cloud dataset. The most important among them arethenormal vector computation, the segmentation of points to extract planarfaces, a classification of planarsegmentsto detect the beam side facesand finally theparametric modelling of the beams on the basis of classified segments. Thisenablesa highly automated transitionfrom raw point cloud data to a geometric model containing beams of the structural system. The geometric model,as well as additional information about the structural properties of involved wooden beams and their joints,is necessaryinput for a furtherstructural modellingof timber constructions. The results of the workflow confirm that the proposed methods work well for beams with a rectangularcross-section and minor deformations. Scan shadows and occlusionof beamsby additional installationsor interlockingbeamsdecreases the modelling performance, but in generala high level ofaccuracy and completeness isachieved ata high degree of automation.[ES] Las estructuras históricas de madera requieren un análisis arquitectónico y estructural exhaustivo de su condición real en aras de planificar la reutilización flexible, el mantenimiento y la restauración. Los métodos actuales que modelan las construcciones de cubiertas pasan por aplicar varias etapas en modo manual, que incluye el lento modelado dimensional. El desarrollo continuo de escáneres láser terrestres aumenta la exactitud, la comodidad y la velocidad del trabajo topográfico en construcciones de tejados. Las nubes de puntos resultantes permiten la visualización detallada de las construcciones representadas por puntos o mallas poligonales, pero de hecho no contienen información sobre el sistema estructural y los elementos del travesaño. El flujo de trabajo desarrollado contiene varias etapas de procesamiento en el conjunto de datos de la nube de puntos. Los más importantes son el cálculo del vector normal, la segmentación de puntos que extraen caras planas, la clasificación de segmentos planos que detectan las caras laterales del travesaño y, finalmente, el modelado paramétrico de los travesaños en función de los segmentos clasificados. Esto permite una transición altamente automatizada de los datos de la nube de puntos brutos a un modelo geométrico que contiene los travesaños del sistema estructural. El modelo geométrico, así como la información adicional sobre las propiedades estructurales de las vigas de madera involucradas y de sus juntas, es información necesaria de entrada para el modelado estructural eventual de las construcciones de madera. Los resultados del flujo de trabajo confirman que los métodos propuestos funcionan bien en travesaños que presentan secciones transversales rectangulares y deformaciones menores. Las sombras en los escaneados y las oclusiones de los travesaños a partir de instalaciones adicionales o vigas entrelazados disminuye el rendimiento del modelado, pero en general se logra un nivel de exactitud e integridad elevado con un alto grado de automatización.Pöchtrager, M.; Styhler-Aydın, G.; Döring-Williams, M.; Pfeifer, N. (2018). Digital reconstruction of historic roof structures: developing a workflow for a highly automated analysis. Virtual Archaeology Review. 9(19):21-33. doi:10.4995/var.2018.8855SWORD2133919Attene, M., & Spagnuolo, M. (2000). Automatic surface reconstruction from point sets in space. Computer Graphics Forum, 19(3), 457-465. doi:10.1111/1467-8659.00438Baik, A., Yaagoubi, R., & Boehm, J. (2015). 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Reconstruction of polygonal prisms from point-clouds of engineering facilities. Journal of Computational Design and Engineering, 3(4), 322-329. doi:10.1016/j.jcde.2016.05.003Dore, C., & Murphy, M. (2017). Current state of the art historic building information modelling. International Archives of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, XLII-2/W5, 185-192. doi:10.5194/isprsarchives-XLII-2-W5-185-2017Dorninger, P., Nothegger, C., & Rasztovits, S. (2013). Efficient 3-D documentation of Neptune fountain in the park of Schönbrunn palace at millimeter scale. Proceedings XXIV International CIPA Symposium, ISPRS Annals, II, 5/W1, 103-108. doi:10.5194/isprsannals-II-5-W1-103-2013Eßer, G., Styhler-Aydın, G., & Hochreiner, G. (2016a). Construction history and structural assessment of historic roofs - An interdisciplinary approach. In K. Van Balen, & E. Verstrynge (Eds.), Structural analysis of historical constructions. 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Plane Segmentation and Registration of Sparse and Heterogeneous Mobile Laser Scanning Point Clouds

This research discussed and analysed the limitations of different state of the art methods for point cloud processing tasks due to the sparseness and the heterogeneousness of the MLS point clouds. A novel plane detection and segmentation method for sparse MLS point clouds is proposed. Finally, the most suitable techniques for automatic registration of MLS sparse point clouds were determined based on a new error metric for evaluation

Vegetation Detection and Classification for Power Line Monitoring

Electrical network maintenance inspections must be regularly executed, to provide a continuous distribution of electricity. In forested countries, the electrical network is mostly located within the forest. For this reason, during these inspections, it is also necessary to assure that vegetation growing close to the power line does not potentially endanger it, provoking forest fires or power outages. Several remote sensing techniques have been studied in the last years to replace the labor-intensive and costly traditional approaches, be it field based or airborne surveillance. Besides the previously mentioned disadvantages, these approaches are also prone to error, since they are dependent of a human operator’s interpretation. In recent years, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) platform applicability for this purpose has been under debate, due to its flexibility and potential for customisation, as well as the fact it can fly close to the power lines. The present study proposes a vegetation management and power line monitoring method, using a UAV platform. This method starts with the collection of point cloud data in a forest environment composed of power line structures and vegetation growing close to it. Following this process, multiple steps are taken, including: detection of objects in the working environment; classification of said objects into their respective class labels using a feature-based classifier, either vegetation or power line structures; optimisation of the classification results using point cloud filtering or segmentation algorithms. The method is tested using both synthetic and real data of forested areas containing power line structures. The Overall Accuracy of the classification process is about 87% and 97-99% for synthetic and real data, respectively. After the optimisation process, these values were refined to 92% for synthetic data and nearly 100% for real data. A detailed comparison and discussion of results is presented, providing the most important evaluation metrics and a visual representations of the attained results.Manutenções regulares da rede elétrica devem ser realizadas de forma a assegurar uma distribuição contínua de eletricidade. Em países com elevada densidade florestal, a rede elétrica encontra-se localizada maioritariamente no interior das florestas. Por isso, durante estas inspeções, é necessário assegurar também que a vegetação próxima da rede elétrica não a coloca em risco, provocando incêndios ou falhas elétricas. Diversas técnicas de deteção remota foram estudadas nos últimos anos para substituir as tradicionais abordagens dispendiosas com mão-de-obra intensiva, sejam elas através de vigilância terrestre ou aérea. Além das desvantagens mencionadas anteriormente, estas abordagens estão também sujeitas a erros, pois estão dependentes da interpretação de um operador humano. Recentemente, a aplicabilidade de plataformas com Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) tem sido debatida, devido à sua flexibilidade e potencial personalização, assim como o facto de conseguirem voar mais próximas das linhas elétricas. O presente estudo propõe um método para a gestão da vegetação e monitorização da rede elétrica, utilizando uma plataforma UAV. Este método começa pela recolha de dados point cloud num ambiente florestal composto por estruturas da rede elétrica e vegetação em crescimento próximo da mesma. Em seguida,múltiplos passos são seguidos, incluindo: deteção de objetos no ambiente; classificação destes objetos com as respetivas etiquetas de classe através de um classificador baseado em features, vegetação ou estruturas da rede elétrica; otimização dos resultados da classificação utilizando algoritmos de filtragem ou segmentação de point cloud. Este método é testado usando dados sintéticos e reais de áreas florestais com estruturas elétricas. A exatidão do processo de classificação é cerca de 87% e 97-99% para os dados sintéticos e reais, respetivamente. Após o processo de otimização, estes valores aumentam para 92% para os dados sintéticos e cerca de 100% para os dados reais. Uma comparação e discussão de resultados é apresentada, fornecendo as métricas de avaliação mais importantes e uma representação visual dos resultados obtidos

Automatic Fracture Orientation Extraction from SfM Point Clouds

Geology seeks to understand the history of the Earth and its surface processes through charac- terisation of surface formations and rock units. Chief among the geologists’ tools are rock unit orientation measurements, such as Strike, Dip and Dip Direction. These allow an understanding of both surface and sub-structure on both the local and macro scale. Although the way these techniques can be used to characterise geology are well understood, the need to collect these measurements by hand adds time and expense to the work of the geologist, precludes spontaneity in field work, and coverage is limited to where the geologist can physically reach. In robotics and computer vision, multi-view geometry techniques such as Structure from Motion (SfM) allows reconstructions of objects and scenes using multiple camera views. SfM-based techniques provide advantages over Lidar-type techniques, in areas such as cost and flexibility of use in more varied environmental conditions, while sacrificing extreme levels of fidelity. Regardless of this, camera based techniques such as SfM, have developed to the point where accuracy is possible in the decimetre range. Here is presented a system to automate the measurement of Strike, Dip and Dip Direction using multi-view geometry from video. Rather than deriving measurements using a method applied to the images, such as the Hough Transform, this method takes measurements directly from the software generated point cloud. Point cloud noise is mitigated using a Mahalanobis distance implementation. Significant structure is characterised using a k-nearest neighbour region growing algorithm, and final surface orientations are quantified using the plane, and normal direction cosines

High-performance geometric vascular modelling

Image-based high-performance geometric vascular modelling and reconstruction is an essential component of computer-assisted surgery on the diagnosis, analysis and treatment of cardiovascular diseases. However, it is an extremely challenging task to efficiently reconstruct the accurate geometric structures of blood vessels out of medical images. For one thing, the shape of an individual section of a blood vessel is highly irregular because of the squeeze of other tissues and the deformation caused by vascular diseases. For another, a vascular system is a very complicated network of blood vessels with different types of branching structures. Although some existing vascular modelling techniques can reconstruct the geometric structure of a vascular system, they are either time-consuming or lacking sufficient accuracy. What is more, these techniques rarely consider the interior tissue of the vascular wall, which consists of complicated layered structures. As a result, it is necessary to develop a better vascular geometric modelling technique, which is not only of high performance and high accuracy in the reconstruction of vascular surfaces, but can also be used to model the interior tissue structures of the vascular walls.This research aims to develop a state-of-the-art patient-specific medical image-based geometric vascular modelling technique to solve the above problems. The main contributions of this research are:- Developed and proposed the Skeleton Marching technique to reconstruct the geometric structures of blood vessels with high performance and high accuracy. With the proposed technique, the highly complicated vascular reconstruction task is reduced to a set of simple localised geometric reconstruction tasks, which can be carried out in a parallel manner. These locally reconstructed vascular geometric segments are then combined together using shape-preserving blending operations to faithfully represent the geometric shape of the whole vascular system.- Developed and proposed the Thin Implicit Patch method to realistically model the interior geometric structures of the vascular tissues. This method allows the multi-layer interior tissue structures to be embedded inside the vascular wall to illustrate the geometric details of the blood vessel in real world

Robust statistical approaches for feature extraction in laser scanning 3D point cloud data

Three dimensional point cloud data acquired from mobile laser scanning system commonly contain outliers and/or noise. The presence of outliers and noise means most of the frequently used methods for feature extraction produce inaccurate and non-robust results. We investigate the problems of outliers and how to accommodate them for automatic robust feature extraction. This thesis develops algorithms for outlier detection, point cloud denoising, robust feature extraction, segmentation and ground surface extraction

Building demolition estimation in urban road widening projects using as-is BIM models

Building demolition caused by urban road widening projects can lead to engineering, economic, and environmental issues and should be planned at the design stage. Based on as-is BIM, this paper proposes a method to estimate the building demolition caused by urban road widening using online map data and statistics on government websites. The as-is BIM models of the existing old road and its surrounding buildings are created, and the BIM models of the newly widened road are built based on the as-is BIM models considering road components in accordance with road engineering expressions to assist building demolition estimation using clash detection. This paper presents a cost-effective building demolition estimation in urban road widening projects without field surveys. It was tested on the M4 Motorway project in London. It has been proved to be a very practical approach to facilitate urban road planning and decision making