Plane-based registration of construction laser scans with 3D/4D building models

With the development of building information modelling (BIM) and terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) in the architecture, engineering, construction and facility management (AEC/FM) industry, the registration of site laser scans and project 3D (BIM) models in a common coordinate system is becoming critical to effective project control. The co-registration of 3D datasets is normally performed in two steps: coarse registration followed by fine registration. Focusing on the coarse registration, model-scan registration has been well investigated in the past, but it is shown in this article that the context of the AEC/FM industry presents specific (1) constraints that make fully-automated registration very complex and often ill-posed, and (2) advantages that can be leveraged to develop simpler yet effective registration methods.This paper thus presents a novel semi-automated plane-based registration system for coarse registration of laser scanned 3D point clouds with project 3D models in the context of the AEC/FM industry. The system is based on the extraction of planes from the laser scanned point cloud and project 3D/4D model. Planes are automatically extracted from the 3D/4D model. For the point cloud data, two methods are investigated. The first one is fully automated, and the second is a semi-automated but effective one-click RANSAC-supported extraction method. In both cases, planes are then manually but intuitively matched by the user. Experiments, which compare the proposed system to software packages commonly used in the AEC/FM industry, demonstrate that at least as good registration quality can be achieved by the proposed system, in a simpler and faster way. It is concluded that, in the AEC/FM context, the proposed plane-based registration system is a compelling alternative to standard point-based registration techniques.