Summary of Point Cloud Data Processing Algorithms and Applications in Civil Engineering and Future Prospects

Abstract

In recent years, due to a declining working population and the rapid aging of the vast number of existing civil structures, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT) has proposed Digital Transformation (DX), i-Construction, and Construction Information Modeling (CIM) for the purpose of improving productivity. Conventional management using paper-based 2D drawings and ledgers have problems of data scattering and are not easy to understand unless one is a skilled engineer. So, technology is required to store the shape information of objects in 3D data. Recently, point cloud data, which can efficiently obtain the 3D shape of an object, has been attracting attention due to the development of measurement technology and the release of large-scale data, but there are still many issues to be solved in the realization of technology for processing point cloud data after measurement. This paper summarizes the measurement methods and processing algorithms for point cloud data, describes how they have been applied in recent years in the field of civil engineering, and discusses future challenges and prospects.