SEMI-AUTOMATED TOPOLOGY ADJUSTMENT OF PARTIAL WALL GEOMETRY

Abstract. The reconstruction of Building Information Modeling objects for as-built modeling is currently the subject of ongoing research. A popular method is to extract building information from point cloud data to create a set of parametric objects. The automation of this process is highly desired by the industry but is currently hindered by occlusions, clutter and the complexity of the building geometry. To create an as-built BIM, it is vital to not only accurately reconstruct the building’s structure but also to compute the topology between the objects. More specifically, we target the topology of the reconstructed partial wall geometry as this forms the basis for other objects.

In this work, a novel method is presented to automatically adjust the topology of wall geometry in an as-built BIM. We present a semi-automated method that procedurally evaluates the configuration of reconstructed objects and adjusts them to create a more faithful BIM. A wall connection evaluation algorithm is proposed that takes as input the centrelines of partial wall geometry and a set of floor and ceilings mesh segments and outputs the topologically adjusted objects. The method is tested on a variety of scenes and shows promising results to reliably compute the topology of as-built models. The generated geometry is similar to the geometric modification proposed by expert modelers. A key advantage is that the algorithm operates directly in Revit and Rhino and can be used for new models as well as for updating existing models.