BIM Informed Visual SLAM for Construction Environments
It addresses the problem of accurate real-time mapping for construction monitoring, which is critical for comparing as-built states with as-planned designs.
The paper augments an RGB-D SLAM system with BIM-derived structural priors to reduce trajectory drift in construction environments, achieving a 25.23% reduction in trajectory error and 7.14% improvement in map accuracy over baselines.
Monitoring building construction sites requires comparing the as-planned design with the as-built state, which can be estimated in real time using Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) techniques. However, visual SLAM is prone to trajectory drift in construction environments, producing maps that are geometrically inaccurate with the actual environment. To address this limitation, we augment an existing RGB-D SLAM system with structural priors derived from the Building Information Model (BIM). The system associates detected walls with their BIM counterparts and includes these correspondences as geometric constraints in the back-end optimization, reducing drift and enhancing global consistency. The proposed method operates in real time and is validated on multiple real construction sites, achieving an average trajectory error reduction of 25.23% and a 7.14% improvement in map accuracy over state-of-the-art baselines. Robustness analyses further demonstrate resilience to incomplete BIM data and geometric discrepancies between as-planned models and the as-built environment.