A Study on Automatic Modeling of Pipelines Connection Using Point Cloud

Abstract

Manual 3D pipeline modeling from LiDAR scanned point cloud data is laborious and time-consuming process. This paper presents a method to extract the pipe, elbow and branch information which is essential to the automatic modeling of the pipeline connection. The pipe geometry is estimated from the point cloud data through the Hough transform and the elbow position is calculated by the medial axis intersection for assembling the nearest pair of pipes. The branch is also created for a pair of pipe segments by estimating the virtual points on one pipe segment and checking for any feasible intersection with the other pipe's endpoint within the pre-defined range of distance. As a result of the automatic modeling, a complete 3D pipeline model is generated by connecting the extracted information of pipes, elbows and branches.