Boundary Representation Modeling from Point Clouds

Abstract: Inspections of bridges are today performed ocularly by an inspector at arm’s lengths distance to evaluate damages and to assess its current condition. Ocular inspections often require specialized equipment to aid the inspector to reach all parts of the bridge. The current state of practice for bridge inspection is therefore considered to be time-consuming, costly, and a safety hazard for the inspector. The purpose of this thesis has been to develop a method for automated modeling of bridges from point cloud data. Point clouds that have been created through photogrammetry from a collection of images acquired with an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). This thesis has been an attempt to contribute to the long-term goal of making bridge inspections more efficient by using UAV technology. Several methods for the identification of structural components in point clouds have been evaluated. Based on this, a method has been developed to identify planar surfaces using the model-fitting method Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC). The developed method consists of a set of algorithms written in the programming language Python. The method utilizes intersection points between planes as well as the k-Nearest-Neighbor (k-NN) concept to identify the vertices of the structural elements. The method has been tested both for simulated point cloud data as well as for real bridges, where the images were acquired with a UAV. The results from the simulated point clouds showed that the vertices were modeled with a mean deviation of 0.13− 0.34 mm compared to the true vertex coordinates. For a point cloud of a rectangular column, the algorithms identified all relevant surfaces and were able to reconstruct it with a deviation of less than 2 % for the width and length. The method was also tested on two point clouds of real bridges. The algorithms were able to identify many of the relevant surfaces, but the complexity of the geometries resulted in inadequately reconstructed models.