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.