Parametric Architectural Elements from Point Clouds for HBIM Applications

To preserve tangible cultural assets for the future, it is crucial to make sure that the maintenance, repair, and restoration of these buildings are of high quality. To ensure proper cultural heritage preservation, highly accurate measurement and modelling methods are necessary. For this purpose, laser scanner systems are widely used; without any doubt, these systems provide many advantages over conventional measuring techniques. On the other hand, the scan angle, the distance to the object, the object’s material composition, the atmospheric conditions, as well as obstacles between the scanner and objects, can cause gaps or noise in the point clouds, making it challenging to manage and interpret the resulting datasets. Thus, extracting the geometries of architectural facade elements from these point clouds is often tedious and requires a high level of expertise. Projects utilizing Building Information Modelling (BIM) Systems have recently begun in Turkey. Although this technology is generally applied to address the whole life cycle of new buildings beginning with the design stage, it is necessary to define existing structures in this system. In this context, research-development and practices related to tangible cultural assets are carried out under the name of the Historic Building Information System (HBIM). In our study, we create parametric models that needed for transferring the cultural assets, which subject to deformation over years. A semi-automatic methodology based on the RANSAC algorithm was applied to extract geometry from point cloud data that contains noise. The obtained model was transferred to BIM following IFC standards. Şehzade Mosque, built by Mimar Sinan in the 16th century Ottoman Classical Period during the reign of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, was chosen as the application area of the study. The architectural elements obtained from the application of the current point clouds were compared with the existing architectural drawings, and the contributions of the study were evaluated.