An Automatic Method for Calculating I-Beam Section Geometric Parameters

I-beam is a kind of component widely used in building constructions. With the development of Laser Imaging Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) and Building Information Model (BIM), the demand for obtaining the section geometric parameter from point cloud data is more urgent. And there is no current automatic method to satisfy the purpose. In this paper, an automatic method for calculating section geometric parameters I-beam from the point cloud is presented. Firstly, a coarse-to-fine strategy is employed to extract the centerline of the I-beam. Secondly, a slice projected along the centerline is utilized for the fitting of section edges. Then, the parameters are derived by calculating the distances between corresponding edges. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated through two experiments involving simulation and real-scanned data. The results obtained by the proposed method are close to the ground-truth value, which shows that the proposed method performs well in calculating I-beam section geometric parameters.