Generating 2D Building Floors from 3D Point Clouds

Abstract

Laser scanning (LS) is an effective technology for accurately capturing point clouds of visible surfaces of objects in 3D scenes. The point clouds were subsequently used for various applications, for example, generating 2D drawings of the floor or building information models (BIM) and structural inspection. However, in practice, the products from point cloud are created mainly by using commercial software, in which the quality primarily depends on users’ experiences and may contain the error caused by technician carelessness. This paper proposed a new method to automatically extract the point clouds of the floor and create a 2D drawing of floor slabs. This method analyses features of the points within cells of a 2D cell grid in the xy plane to extract candidate points of the building and each floor, while the cell- and point-based region growing segmentations were employed to extract the final points of the floor and each edge of the floor, respectively. The proposed method was successfully tested on 7.5 million points of a concrete, two-story building with 17 m long x 7m width x 7m height.