Markerless BIM Registration for Mobile Augmented Reality Based Inspection

On-site construction inspection requires extensive data extraction from paper or digital drawings and/or databases. This is time consuming and labour intensive. One of the potentially viable solutions to this problem is providing easier access to such data through mobile augmented reality (AR) systems. Such systems can facilitate simpler, faster and more accurate inspection processes by allowing users to have instant access to better visualisations of the Building Information Model (BIM) for the location they inspect. One of the main problems of current AR systems is in having an accurate alignment of the BIM on the user’s view. In order to solve this problem, researchers have proposed solutions that either use tags, restrict the user to specific spots, or rely on Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and compasses that are unable to be used in an indoor environment. This paper presents an alternative, markerless solution based on the Kinect Fusion, since new mobile augmented reality devices are equipped with similar RGB and depth sensors. This solution combines the registration of the camera pose provided by Kinect Fusion with the registration achieved using the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm on the 3D reconstruction generated by Kinect Fusion. The results indicate the potential for maintaining a stable registration while traversing indoors, while generating 3D data that can be used to sense the user’s surroundings.