Automatic construction of structural meshes from photographic and laser surveys

Abstract

Abstract. The focus of this paper is the analyses of various work pipelines, allowing to manage the transition from in-situ surveys to cloud of points and geometric meshes optimized for structural purposes. This topic is very challenging, and today is almost always performed through homemade, uncontrolled, approaches, requiring the passage of information between numerous codes. These unsupervised workflows often compromise the integrity and the reliability of the results. Here two experimental case studies are reported to check the performances of two pipelines, based on photographic and laser surveys, respectively. The proposed comparison is used to outline significant indications on how properly manage the transformation, in order to create a “true” digital twin of the given structure.

A Perspective on AI-Based Image Analysis and Utilization Technologies in Building Engineering: Recent Developments and New Directions

“…Refs. [45,46] proposed and simulated two different scan-to-BIM-to-FEM pipelines, highlighting in both of cases how the BIM to FEM transition is still cumbersome and susceptible to macroscopic errors. The need for an automated procedure for the transition from BIM to FEM, possibly fully governed by artificial intelligence, becomes increasingly widespread as its usefulness is more and more requested in the monitoring and maintenance phases of existing structures, especially the ones belonging to the historical architectural heritage (as the cases showed in [47,48]).…”