Towards the extraction of hierarchical building descriptions from 3D indoor scans

Abstract

We present a new method for the hierarchical decomposition of 3D indoor scans and the subsequent generation of an according hierarchical graph-based building descriptor. The hierarchy consists of four basic levels with according entities, building - storey - room - object. All entities are represented as attributed nodes in a graph and are linked to the upper level entity they are located in. Additionally, nodes of the same level are linked depending on their spatial and topological relationship. The hierarchical description enables easy navigation in the formerly unstructured data, measurement takings, as well as carrying out retrieval tasks that incorporate geometric, topological, and also functional building properties describing e.g. the designated use of single rooms according to the objects it contains. In contrast to previous methods which either focus on the segmentation into rooms or on the recognition of indoor objects, our holistic approach incorporates a rather large spectrum of entities on different semantic levels that are inherent to 3D building representations. In our evaluation we show the feasibility of our method for extraction of hierarchical building descriptions for various tasks using synthetic as well as real world data.