Extracting Indoor Space Information in Complex Building Environments

Abstract

Indoor space information extraction is an important aspect of reconstruction for building information modeling and a necessary process for geographic information system from outdoor to indoor. Entity model extracting methods provide advantages in terms of accuracy for building indoor spaces, as compared with network and grid model methods, and the extraction results can be converted into a network or grid model. However, existing entity model extracting methods based on a search loop do not consider the complex indoor environment of a building, such as isolated columns and walls or cross-floor spaces. In this study, such complex indoor environments are analyzed in detail, and a new approach for extracting buildings’ indoor space information is proposed. This approach is based on indoor space boundary calculation, the Boolean difference for single-floor space extraction, relationship reconstruction, and cross-floor space extraction. The experimental results showed that the proposed method can accurately extract indoor space information from the complex indoor environment of a building with geometric, semantic, and relationship information. This study is theoretically important for better understanding the complexity of indoor space extraction and practically important for improving the modeling accuracy of buildings.