Automated Storey Separation and Door and Window Extraction for Building Models from Complete Laser Scans

Heritage buildings are often lost without being adequately documented. Significant research has gone into automated building modelling from point clouds, challenged by irregularities in building design and the presence of occlusion-causing clutter and non-Manhattan World features. Previous work has been largely focused on the extraction and representation of walls, floors, and ceilings from either interior or exterior single storey scans. Significantly less effort has been concentrated on the automated extraction of smaller features such as windows and doors from complete (interior and exterior) scans. In addition, the majority of the work done on automated building reconstruction pertains to the new-build and construction industries, rather than for heritage buildings. This work presents a novel multi-level storey separation technique as well as a novel door and window detection strategy within an end-to-end modelling software for the automated creation of 2D floor plans and 3D building models from complete terrestrial laser scans of heritage buildings. The methods are demonstrated on three heritage sites of varying size and complexity, achieving overall accuracies of 94.74% for multi-level storey separation and 92.75% for the building model creation. Additionally, the automated door and window detection methodology achieved absolute mean dimensional errors of 6.3 cm.

Automated summary

This study introduces a novel multi-level storey separation technique and a novel door and window detection strategy for automated creation of 2D floor plans and 3D building models from complete terrestrial laser scans of heritage buildings. The methods were demonstrated on three heritage sites, achieving overall accuracies of 94.74% for multi-level storey separation and 92.75% for the building model creation. Additionally, the automated door and window detection methodology achieved an absolute mean dimensional error of 6.3 cm.