Integrating Building Information Model and Augmented Reality for Drone-Based Building Inspection

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely accepted for building inspection in recent years. However, the advantages of UAV inspection are not fully leveraged because of the absence of related information to assist decision-making during the inspection process. To address the problem, this study proposes an augmented reality (AR) solution by integrating the UAV inspection workflow with the building information model (BIM) of the building of interest, which is driven to navigate with the aerial video during an inspection which is driven to navigate simultaneously with the aerial video during inspection. The integration enables easy and straightforward retrieval of useful information from BIM to help better understand the risk issues detected from the aerial video. An algorithm pipeline is proposed to drive the connective animation of BIM and the aerial video. The pipeline includes a fast coordinate transformation algorithm (F-Trans) that simplifies the process of converting the WGS-84 coordinates collected by UAVs to BIM project coordinates. An AR system prototype is developed to demonstrate the specific ways of applying the preceding algorithm pipeline to support the UAV-based building inspection. The efficacy of the proposed solution has been validated by experiments. The results demonstrate that the F-Trans can achieve a submeter precision, and the average matching degree between the aerial video and BIM was 74.1%. The developed AR solution has great potential to enable a more efficient, comprehensive, and unbiased UAV-based building inspection.