A Reality Integrated BIM for Architectural Heritage Conservation

Building Information Modeling (BIM) has attracted wide interest in the field of documentation and conservation of Architectural Heritage (AH). Existing approaches focus on converting laser scanned point clouds to BIM objects, but laser scanning is usually limited to planar elements which are not the typical state of AH where free-form and double-curvature surfaces are common. We propose a method that combines low-cost automatic photogrammetric data acquisition techniques with parametric BIM objects founded on Architectural Treatises and a syntax allowing the transition from the archetype to the type. Point clouds with metric accuracy comparable to that from laser scanning allows accurate as-built model semantically integrated with the ideal model from parametric library. The deviation between as-built model and ideal model is evaluated to determine if feature extraction from point clouds is essential to improve the accuracy of as-built BIM.