Digital reconstruction of substation equipment and facility layout via LiDAR point cloud registration

Generating as-built Building information models (BIMs) is promising in power substation construction projects because they can reflect the actual conditions of facilities. However, traditional manual-designed BIMs are different from real-world scenarios due to reality gaps. In this paper, we present a new method of reconstructing the layout of power equipment and facilities in substations using LIDAR point clouds. The proposed method extracts electric equipment and facilities via object segmentation and model retrieval. In particular, we investigate PFH, FPFH and SHOT descriptors for the 3D-SIFT keypoints in the 3D shape retrieval of complex electric equipment and facilities. After the best-match model is retrieved from a model library, the layout of typical electric equipment and facilities is reconstructed by aligning the model to the scene point cloud via point cloud registration. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The proposed method enhances the efficiency of generating 3D models of power substations.