Sustainable maintenance and incremental information update for existing cemeteries based on BIM concepts

Abstract

In recent years, due to declining birth rates, an aging population, and urban population concentration, temple-managed cemeteries have become more dependent on manual, analog methods. This has made succession and maintenance difficult, leading to a growing problem of neglected graves. In this study, focusing on existing cemeteries, we propose a management method based on the BIM concept—which integrates 3D geometry and attribute information—to create 3D models of the entire cemetery using photogrammetry and to enable sequential updating of these 3D models using data captured by smartphones. We achieved an update process that requires no specialized knowledge by extracting gravestone areas through semantic segmentation of point clouds and performing automatic alignment using a combination of PCA and ICP. Verification using real data demonstrated that gravestones can be automatically extracted with a recall rate of 95.4%, and that integration with updated data is possible with accuracy akin to the noise level, thereby establishing the effectiveness of this approach as a basis for sustainable cemetery management.