Scan-to-BIM for As-built Roads: Automatic Road Digital Twinning from Semantically Labeled Point Cloud Data
This addresses the problem of low automation and accuracy in road digital twinning for infrastructure management, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing scan-to-BIM methods with specific asset types.
The paper tackles the challenge of automating geometric digital twin creation for as-built roads by proposing a scan-to-BIM framework that processes semantically labeled point cloud data, achieving an average distance error of 1.46 cm and a processing speed of 6.29 m/s on real-world data.
Creating geometric digital twins (gDT) for as-built roads still faces many challenges, such as low automation level and accuracy, limited asset types and shapes, and reliance on engineering experience. A novel scan-to-building information modeling (scan-to-BIM) framework is proposed for automatic road gDT creation based on semantically labeled point cloud data (PCD), which considers six asset types: Road Surface, Road Side (Slope), Road Lane (Marking), Road Sign, Road Light, and Guardrail. The framework first segments the semantic PCD into spatially independent instances or parts, then extracts the sectional polygon contours as their representative geometric information, stored in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) files using a new data structure. Primitive gDTs are finally created from JSON files using corresponding conversion algorithms. The proposed method achieves an average distance error of 1.46 centimeters and a processing speed of 6.29 meters per second on six real-world road segments with a total length of 1,200 meters.