RegARD: Symmetry-Based Coarse Registration of Smartphone’s Colorful Point Clouds with CAD Drawings for Low-Cost Digital Twin Buildings

Abstract

Coarse registration of 3D point clouds plays an indispensable role for parametric, semantically rich, and realistic digital twin buildings (DTBs) in the practice of GIScience, manufacturing, robotics, architecture, engineering, and construction. However, the existing methods have prominently been challenged by (i) the high cost of data collection for numerous existing buildings and (ii) the computational complexity from self-similar layout patterns. This paper studies the registration of two low-cost data sets, i.e., colorful 3D point clouds captured by smartphones and 2D CAD drawings, for resolving the first challenge. We propose a novel method named ‘Registration based on Architectural Reflection Detection’ (RegARD) for transforming the self-symmetries in the second challenge from a barrier of coarse registration to a facilitator. First, RegARD detects the innate architectural reflection symmetries to constrain the rotations and reduce degrees of freedom. Then, a nonlinear optimization formulation together with advanced optimization algorithms can overcome the second challenge. As a result, high-quality coarse registration and subsequent low-cost DTBs can be created with semantic components and realistic appearances. Experiments showed that the proposed method outperformed existing methods considerably in both effectiveness and efficiency, i.e., 49.88% less error and 73.13% less time, on average. The RegARD presented in this paper first contributes to coarse registration theories and exploitation of symmetries and textures in 3D point clouds and 2D CAD drawings. For practitioners in the industries, RegARD offers a new automatic solution to utilize ubiquitous smartphone sensors for massive low-cost DTBs.