Extraction of pipes and flanges from point clouds for automated verification of pre-fabricated modules in oil and gas refinery projects

Abstract The application of terrestrial laser scanners for fabrication verification of the components of pre-fabricated modules (such as pipes and flanges) is growing markedly in the oil and gas industry. However, there remains strong reliance on impractical and error-prone manual or semi-automated methods to extract semantic information from the acquired point clouds. This manuscript presents a generic and robust framework for automatic extraction of pipe and flange pairs in pre-fabricated modules using the geometric primitives of the point cloud. It has been tested on two point cloud datasets with different data quality and density acquired from different sites. Our method was able to extract all 49 pipes and flanges correctly and improved the accuracy of the estimated centers and normal vectors by 171% and 145%, respectively, when compared to results from commercially-available verification software. The experiments' results show great promise for generic applicability of the proposed system for fabrication verification purposes.

[1]  I. Kasa.  A circle fitting procedure and its error analysis , 1976, IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement.

[2]  F. Hampel.  A General Qualitative Definition of Robustness , 1971 .

[3]  José Julio Espina Agulló.  New algorithms for computing the least trimmed squares regression estimator , 2001 .

[4]  Carl T. Haas,et al.  State of research in automatic as-built modelling , 2015, Adv. Eng. Informatics.

[5]  David L. Olson,et al.  Advanced Data Mining Techniques , 2008 .

[6]  Vaughan R. Pratt,et al.  Direct least-squares fitting of algebraic surfaces , 1987, SIGGRAPH.

[7]  Stefan Hinz,et al.  Analytical and numerical investigations on the accuracy and robustness of geometric features extracted from 3D point cloud data , 2017 .

[8]  P. L. Davies,et al.  The asymptotics of S-estimators in the linear regression model , 1990 .

[9]  Reza Maalek,et al.  Accuracy assessment of ultra-wide band technology in locating dynamic resources in indoor scenarios , 2016 .

[10]  Mohamed A. El-Reedy.  Construction Management for Industrial Projects: A Modular Guide for Project Managers , 2011 .

[11]  Mani Golparvar-Fard,et al.  Potential of big visual data and building information modeling for construction performance analytics: An exploratory study , 2017 .

[12]  Frédéric Bosché,et al.  Tracking the Built Status of MEP Works: Assessing the Value of a Scan-vs-BIM System , 2014, J. Comput. Civ. Eng..

[13]  Arash Shahi,et al.  Onsite 3D marking for construction activity tracking , 2013 .

[14]  George Vosselman,et al.  Segmentation of point clouds using smoothness constraints , 2006 .

[15]  Derek D. Lichti,et al.  ROBUST CLASSIFICATION AND SEGMENTATION OF PLANAR AND LINEAR FEATURES FOR CONSTRUCTION SITE PROGRESS MONITORING AND STRUCTURAL DIMENSION COMPLIANCE CONTROL , 2015 .

[16]  Derek D. Lichti,et al.  Robust Segmentation of Planar and Linear Features of Terrestrial Laser Scanner Point Clouds Acquired from Construction Sites , 2018, Sensors.

[17]  N. Chernov.  Circular and Linear Regression: Fitting Circles and Lines by Least Squares , 2010 .

[18]  Gabriel Taubin,et al.  Estimation of Planar Curves, Surfaces, and Nonplanar Space Curves Defined by Implicit Equations with Applications to Edge and Range Image Segmentation , 1991, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[19]  David M. Mount,et al.  A practical approximation algorithm for the LMS line estimator , 1997, SODA '97.

[20]  F. Hampel.  The Influence Curve and Its Role in Robust Estimation , 1974 .

[21]  Mani Golparvar-Fard,et al.  Segmentation of building point cloud models including detailed architectural/structural features and MEP systems , 2015 .

[22]  B. Silverman.  Density estimation for statistics and data analysis , 1986 .

[23]  Carl T. Haas,et al.  Automatic Detection of Cylindrical Objects in Built Facilities , 2014, J. Comput. Civ. Eng..

[24]  Frédéric Bosché,et al.  As-built data acquisition and its use for production monitoring and automated layout in civil infrastructure: a survey , 2015 .

[25]  Abdul Nurunnabi,et al.  Robust statistical approaches for local planar surface fitting in 3D laser scanning data , 2014 .

[26]  Andrey Dimitrov,et al.  Non‐Uniform B‐Spline Surface Fitting from Unordered 3D Point Clouds for As‐Built Modeling , 2016, Comput. Aided Civ. Infrastructure Eng..

[27]  Carl T. Haas,et al.  Automated Model‐Based Finding of 3D Objects in Cluttered Construction Point Cloud Models , 2017, Comput. Aided Civ. Infrastructure Eng..

[28]  Frédéric Bosché,et al.  Automated recognition of 3D CAD model objects in laser scans and calculation of as-built dimensions for dimensional compliance control in construction , 2010, Adv. Eng. Informatics.

[29]  S. P. Ellis,et al.  Instability of least squares, least absolute deviation and least median of squares linear regression, with a comment by Stephen Portnoy and Ivan Mizera and a rejoinder by the author , 1998 .

[30]  Frédéric Bosché,et al.  Automated progress tracking using 4D schedule and 3D sensing technologies , 2012 .

[31]  Abdul Nurunnabi,et al.  ROBUST CYLINDER FITTING IN THREE-DIMENSIONAL POINT CLOUD DATA , 2017 .

[32]  Peter J. Rousseeuw,et al.  Robust regression and outlier detection , 1987 .

[33]  A. Leick.  GPS satellite surveying , 1990 .

[34]  Carl T. Haas,et al.  Pipe spool recognition in cluttered point clouds using a curvature-based shape descriptor , 2016 .

[35]  T. Rabbani,et al.  EFFICIENT HOUGH TRANSFORM FOR AUTOMATIC DETECTION OF CYLINDERS IN POINT CLOUDS , 2005 .

[36]  A. Patil,et al.  An adaptive approach for the reconstruction and modeling of as-built 3D pipelines from point clouds , 2017 .

[37]  P. Rousseeuw,et al.  A fast algorithm for the minimum covariance determinant estimator , 1999 .

[38]  Victor J. Yohai,et al.  Robust and efficient estimation of multivariate scatter and location , 2017, Comput. Stat. Data Anal..

[39]  Marc Hofmann,et al.  An Exact Least Trimmed Squares Algorithm for a Range of Coverage Values , 2010 .

[40]  Prasanna Rangarajan,et al.  Hyper least squares fitting of circles and ellipses , 2011, Comput. Stat. Data Anal..

[41]  Mia Hubert,et al.  Robust statistics for outlier detection , 2011, WIREs Data Mining Knowl. Discov..

[42]  Hans-Peter Kriegel,et al.  A Density-Based Algorithm for Discovering Clusters in Large Spatial Databases with Noise , 1996, KDD.

[43]  Carl T. Haas,et al.  Automated 3D compliance checking in pipe spool fabrication , 2014, Adv. Eng. Informatics.

[44]  K. Kanatani,et al.  Improved algebraic methods for circle fitting , 2009 .

[45]  Mia Hubert,et al.  ROBPCA: A New Approach to Robust Principal Component Analysis , 2005, Technometrics.

[46]  Dorin Comaniciu,et al.  Mean Shift: A Robust Approach Toward Feature Space Analysis , 2002, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[47]  M. Hubert,et al.  A Deterministic Algorithm for Robust Location and Scatter , 2012 .

[48]  Changmin Kim,et al.  3D reconstruction of as-built industrial instrumentation models from laser-scan data and a 3D CAD database based on prior knowledge , 2015 .

[49]  PETER J. ROUSSEEUW,et al.  Computing LTS Regression for Large Data Sets , 2005, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery.

[50]  Ilan Shimshoni,et al.  Estimating the principal curvatures and the darboux frame from real 3-D range data , 2003, IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern. Part B.

[51]  Frédéric Bosché,et al.  Automated retrieval of 3D CAD model objects in construction range images , 2008 .

[52]  Frédéric Bosché,et al.  The value of integrating Scan-to-BIM and Scan-vs-BIM techniques for construction monitoring using laser scanning and BIM: The case of cylindrical MEP components , 2015 .

[53]  A. Al-Sharadqah,et al.  Error analysis for circle fitting algorithms , 2009, 0907.0421.

[54]  Karel Klouda.  An exact polynomial time algorithm for computing the least trimmed squares estimate , 2015, Comput. Stat. Data Anal..

[55]  Shuowen Hu,et al.  Estimation of cylinder orientation in three-dimensional point cloud using angular distance-based optimization , 2017 .

[56]  Shigeru Shinomoto,et al.  Kernel bandwidth optimization in spike rate estimation , 2009, Journal of Computational Neuroscience.

[57]  Ariel Shamir,et al.  Mode-detection via median-shift , 2009, 2009 IEEE 12th International Conference on Computer Vision.

[58]  Denis Laurendeau,et al.  Extraction of cylinders and estimation of their parameters from point clouds , 2015, Comput. Graph..