Towards the Definition of Workflows for Automation in HBIM Generation

In the last years creation of as-built Building Information Modelling (BIM), and Historic Building Information Modelling (HBIM) in particular, has become a widely researched topic. In particular, the so-called “Scan.-to-BIM” procedure has received a lot of attention. This is mainly given by the fact that nowadays, terrestrial laser scanning (TLS), either static and mobile, and 3D photogrammetry are quite popular techniques to acquire building geometry raw data. However, turning a set of scans into a BIM model is still a labor-intensive and manual work. This paper presents two workflows for increasing the automation in HBIM generation. The presented approaches differ in the level of automation achieved and in the level of maturity. Indeed, while the first one presents a higher level of automation it is designed only to work in the case straight geometrical features are dominant in the scene (i.e., Manhattan world assumption holds). In addition, it is currently implemented in Matlab. On the other hand, the second one is closer to semi-automated modelling since some manual operations are still needed. However, it is implemented as a Revit Plug-in and for this reason it is more user-friendly.