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International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Volume XL-5/W2, 2013 
XXIV International CIPA Symposium, 2 — 6 September 2013, Strasbourg, France 
FROM POINT CLOUD TO BIM: 
A SURVEY OF EXISTING APPROACHES 
N. Hichri *^* , C. Stefani ^, L. De Luca 5, P. Veron ?, G. Hamon * 
“UMR CNRS LSIS 7296, Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Arts et Métiers ParisTech, 2 Cours des Arts et Métiers 
13617 Aix-en-Provence — France — (nouha.hichri, philippe.veron)@ensam.eu 
PUMR (CNRS/MCC) MAP-Gamsau 3495, Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Marseille, 184 Avenue 
de Luminy 13009 Marseille — France — (chiara.stefani, livio.deluca)@map.archi.fr 
* Art Graphique & Patrimoine, 15-15 bis, avenue Jean Jaurès 94340 Joinville Le Pont — France — 
g-hamon@artgp.fr 
KEY WORDS: Point clouds, Building Information Modeling, as-built BIM, object recognition, shape representation, 
geometric modeling 
ABTRACT: 
In order to handle more efficiently projects of restoration, documentation and maintenance of historical buildings, it is essential 
to rely on a 3D enriched model for the building. Today, the concept of Building Information Modelling (BIM) is widely adopted 
for the semantization of digital mockups and few research focused on the value of this concept in the field of cultural heritage. 
In addition historical buildings are already built, so it is necessary to develop a performing approach, based on a first step of 
building survey, to develop a semantically enriched digital model. For these reasons, this paper focuses on this chain starting 
with a point cloud and leading to the well-structured final BIM; and proposes an analysis and a survey of existing approaches 
on the topics of: acquisition, segmentation and BIM creation. It also, presents a critical analysis on the application of this chain 
in the field of cultural heritage 
1 INTRODUCTION collaboration between the various actors in the different 
phases of the building life cycle. It is also based on a set of 
In recent years there has been an increasing need to have structured architectural information on buildings, 
structured and semantically enriched 3D digital models of concerning components, characteristics and relations 
historical buildings in order to handle, more efficiently, between them, and allows both to complete and to enrich 
projects of maintenance, restoration, conservation or the purely geometric description of a digital mock-up by 
modification. In effect, in order to acquire accurate data associating semantic features. 
on existing buildings, various survey techniques are 
adopted such as laser scanner, which allows obtaining raw 1.1 Fundamental problem 
3D points clouds of buildings. Then, it is necessary to 
focus on an efficient way to shift from this raw 3D data to However, in architecture there is no efficient software 
a complete and semantically enriched CAD building ensuring this direct shift from point clouds to complete 
model. enriched CAD models, even if some software companies 
(such as Autodesk with Revit) are proposing new tools for 
The concept of Building Information Modeling (BIM), its exporting point clouds. In practice, any dedicated software 
expansion and democratization among professionals in the can help semantically structuring or efficiently segmenting 
field of AED (Architecture, Engineering and Design), point clouds of historical buildings. The specificity of 
make it essential in this quest of semantization of digital historical components makes this task very difficult. 
mock-ups. It can be both defined as a technology and as a 
methodology. It is a technology because it is a digital In addition, in order to build an efficient digital 
representation of physical and functional characteristics of representation of historical buildings it is essential to 
a building, and it is a methodology because it enables the analyze and understand the entire chain that goes from the 
  
: Corresponding author 
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