ABTRACT:In order to handle more efficiently projects of restoration, documentation and maintenance of historical buildings, it is essential to rely on a 3D enriched model for the building. Today, the concept of Building Information Modelling (BIM) is widely adopted for the semantization of digital mockups and few research focused on the value of this concept in the field of cultural heritage. In addition historical buildings are already built, so it is necessary to develop a performing approach, based on a first step of building survey, to develop a semantically enriched digital model. For these reasons, this paper focuses on this chain starting with a point cloud and leading to the well-structured final BIM; and proposes an analysis and a survey of existing approaches on the topics of: acquisition, segmentation and BIM creation. It also, presents a critical analysis on the application of this chain in the field of cultural heritage
INTRODUCTIONIn recent years there has been an increasing need to have structured and semantically enriched 3D digital models of historical buildings in order to handle, more efficiently, projects of maintenance, restoration, conservation or modification. In effect, in order to acquire accurate data on existing buildings, various survey techniques are adopted such as laser scanner, which allows obtaining raw 3D points clouds of buildings. Then, it is necessary to focus on an efficient way to shift from this raw 3D data to a complete and semantically enriched CAD building model.The concept of Building Information Modeling (BIM), its expansion and democratization among professionals in the field of AED (Architecture, Engineering and Design), make it essential in this quest of semantization of digital mock-ups. It can be both defined as a technology and as a methodology. It is a technology because it is a digital representation of physical and functional characteristics of a building, and it is a methodology because it enables the * Corresponding author collaboration between the various actors in the different phases of the building life cycle. It is also based on a set of structured architectural information on buildings, concerning components, characteristics and relations between them, and allows both to complete and to enrich the purely geometric description of a digital mock-up by associating semantic features.