All-Automatic 3D BIM Modeling of Existing Buildings

In order to ensure a reliable building life cycle management, it is essential to generate an accurate and up-to-date referential mock-up that will be used for renovation, extension and maintenance. Based on this statement, we carried out, in a previous work, a research study in the sake of reconstructing a 3D CAD model from a point cloud acquired using a Lidar. This point cloud is processed automatically to detect planes and contours and to generate the 3D CAD model. However, during the life cycle of the project, different actors from different fields intervene on the building, which creates several communication conflicts, and this means a loss of time, energy and money. In order to ensure a constructive collaboration and a simplified data exchange between the different contributors in the building, we continued our work to propose, in this paper, an automatic conversion of a point cloud to a 3D BIM file. This conversion induces the passage to the standard IFC format and the integration of a valuable knowledge in it. To do so, an automatic classification of contours into architectural elements is proposed. It consists in defining a hierarchical classification rule reproducing the human reasoning for classifying the architectural elements. Then, based on the classified set of polygons, an automatic generation of 3D IFC model is proposed.