Skip to main content

A Framework for 3D Modeling of Construction Sites Using Aerial Imagery and Semantic NeRFs

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
MultiMedia Modeling (MMM 2024)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14557))

Included in the following conference series:

  • 369 Accesses

Abstract

The rapid evolution of drone technology has revolutionized data acquisition in the construction industry, offering a cost-effective and efficient method to monitor and map engineering structures. However, a significant challenge remains in transforming the drone-collected data into semantically meaningful 3D models. 3D reconstruction techniques usually lead to raw point clouds that are typically unstructured and lack the semantic and geometric information of objects needed for civil engineering tools. Our solution applies semantic segmentation algorithms to the data produced by NeRF (Neural Radiance Fields), effectively transforming drone-captured 3D volumetric representations into semantically rich 3D models. This approach offers a cost-effective and automated way to digitalize physical objects of construction sites into semantically annotated digital counterparts facilitating the development of digital twins or XR applications in the construction sector.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 59.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 74.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Adams, S.M., Friedland, C.J.: A survey of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) usage for imagery collection in disaster research and management. In: 9th International Workshop on Remote Sensing for Disaster Response, vol. 8, pp. 1–8 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Anwar, N., Izhar, M.A., Najam, F.A.: Construction monitoring and reporting using drones and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In: The Tenth International Conference on Construction in the 21st Century (CITC-2010), pp. 2–4 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Ashour, R., et al.: Site inspection drone: a solution for inspecting and regulating construction sites. In: 2016 IEEE 59th International Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems (MWSCAS), pp. 1–4. IEEE (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Barron, J.T., et al.: MIP-NERF: a multiscale representation for anti-aliasing neural radiance fields. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision, pp. 5855–5864 (2021)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Chacón, R., et al.: On the digital twinning of load tests in railway bridges. Case study: high speed railway network, extremadura, Spain. In: Bridge Safety, Maintenance, Management, Life-Cycle, Resilience and Sustainability, pp. 819–827. CRC Press (2022)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Chacón, R., Ramonell, C., Puig-Polo, C., Mirambell, E.: Geometrical digital twinning of a tapered, horizontally curved composite box girder bridge. ce/papers 5(4), 52–58 (2022)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Chen, L.C., Papandreou, G., Kokkinos, I., Murphy, K., Yuille, A.L.: Deeplab: semantic image segmentation with deep convolutional nets, atrous convolution, and fully connected crfs. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 40(4), 834–848 (2017)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Chen, L.C., Zhu, Y., Papandreou, G., Schroff, F., Adam, H.: Encoder-decoder with atrous separable convolution for semantic image segmentation. In: Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), pp. 801–818 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  9. DeTone, D., Malisiewicz, T., Rabinovich, A.: Superpoint: self-supervised interest point detection and description. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops, pp. 224–236 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Ezequiel, C.A.F., et al.: UAV aerial imaging applications for post-disaster assessment, environmental management and infrastructure development. In: 2014 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS), pp. 274–283. IEEE (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Fu, X., et al.: Panoptic nerf: 3d-to-2d label transfer for panoptic urban scene segmentation. In: 2022 International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV), pp. 1–11. IEEE (2022)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Han, K.K., Golparvar-Fard, M.: Potential of big visual data and building information modeling for construction performance analytics: an exploratory study. Autom. Constr. 73, 184–198 (2017)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Hu, Q., et al.: Randla-net: efficient semantic segmentation of large-scale point clouds. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 11108–11117 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Huang, H.-P., Tseng, H.-Y., Lee, H.-Y., Huang, J.-B.: Semantic view synthesis. In: Vedaldi, A., Bischof, H., Brox, T., Frahm, J.-M. (eds.) ECCV 2020. LNCS, vol. 12357, pp. 592–608. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58610-2_35

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  15. Koulalis, I., Dourvas, N., Triantafyllidis, T., Ioannidis, K., Vrochidis, S., Kompatsiaris, I.: A survey for image based methods in construction: from images to digital twins. In: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Content-based Multimedia Indexing, pp. 103–110 (2022)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Kundu, A., et al.: Panoptic neural fields: a semantic object-aware neural scene representation. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 12871–12881 (2022)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Landrieu, L., Simonovsky, M.: Large-scale point cloud semantic segmentation with superpoint graphs. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 4558–4567 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Li, Y., Liu, C.: Applications of multirotor drone technologies in construction management. Int. J. Constr. Manag. 19(5), 401–412 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Liu, P., et al.: A review of rotorcraft unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) developments and applications in civil engineering. Smart Struct. Syst. 13(6), 1065–1094 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Martin-Brualla, R., Radwan, N., Sajjadi, M.S., Barron, J.T., Dosovitskiy, A., Duckworth, D.: Nerf in the wild: neural radiance fields for unconstrained photo collections. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 7210–7219 (2021)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Mildenhall, B., Srinivasan, P.P., Tancik, M., Barron, J.T., Ramamoorthi, R., Ng, R.: Nerf: representing scenes as neural radiance fields for view synthesis. Commun. ACM 65(1), 99–106 (2021)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Mo, Y., Wu, Y., Yang, X., Liu, F., Liao, Y.: Review the state-of-the-art technologies of semantic segmentation based on deep learning. Neurocomputing 493, 626–646 (2022)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Outay, F., Mengash, H.A., Adnan, M.: Applications of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in road safety, traffic and highway infrastructure management: recent advances and challenges. Transport. Res. Part A: Policy Practice 141, 116–129 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Qi, C.R., Su, H., Mo, K., Guibas, L.J.: Pointnet: deep learning on point sets for 3D classification and segmentation. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 652–660 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Qi, C.R., Yi, L., Su, H., Guibas, L.J.: Pointnet++: deep hierarchical feature learning on point sets in a metric space. Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst. 30 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Sarlin, P.E., Cadena, C., Siegwart, R., Dymczyk, M.: From coarse to fine: robust hierarchical localization at large scale. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 12716–12725 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Sarlin, P.E., DeTone, D., Malisiewicz, T., Rabinovich, A.: Superglue: learning feature matching with graph neural networks. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 4938–4947 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  28. Schonberger, J.L., Frahm, J.M.: Structure-from-motion revisited. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 4104–4113 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  29. Tancik, M., et al.: Nerfstudio: a modular framework for neural radiance field development. arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.04264 (2023)

  30. Tsouros, D.C., Triantafyllou, A., Bibi, S., Sarigannidis, P.G.: Data acquisition and analysis methods in UAV-based applications for precision agriculture. In: 2019 15th International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS), pp. 377–384. IEEE (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  31. Ulku, I., Akagündüz, E.: A survey on deep learning-based architectures for semantic segmentation on 2d images. Appl. Artif. Intell. 36(1), 2032924 (2022)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  32. Vacca, A., Onishi, H.: Drones: military weapons, surveillance or mapping tools for environmental monitoring? the need for legal framework is required. Transport. Res. Procedia 25, 51–62 (2017)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  33. Vora, S., et al.: Nesf: neural semantic fields for generalizable semantic segmentation of 3d scenes. arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.13260 (2021)

  34. Wang, Z., Wu, S., Xie, W., Chen, M., Prisacariu, V.A.: Nerf-: neural radiance fields without known camera parameters. arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.07064 (2021)

  35. Zhang, K., Riegler, G., Snavely, N., Koltun, V.: Nerf++: analyzing and improving neural radiance fields. arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.07492 (2020)

  36. Zhao, H., Shi, J., Qi, X., Wang, X., Jia, J.: Pyramid scene parsing network. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 2881–2890 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  37. Zheng, L., et al.: Active scene understanding via online semantic reconstruction. In: Computer Graphics Forum, vol. 38, pp. 103–114. Wiley Online Library (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  38. Zhi, S., Laidlow, T., Leutenegger, S., Davison, A.J.: In-place scene labelling and understanding with implicit scene representation. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision, pp. 15838–15847 (2021)

    Google Scholar 

  39. Zhou, B., Zhao, H., Puig, X., Fidler, S., Barriuso, A., Torralba, A.: Scene parsing through ade20k dataset. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 633–641 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the EC-funded research and innovation programme H2020 ASHVIN: “Digitising and transforming the European construction industry” under the grant agreement No.958161.

EU disclaimer: This publication reflects only author’s view and the European Commission is not responsible for any uses that may be made of the information it contains.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Panagiotis Vrachnos .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Vrachnos, P., Krestenitis, M., Koulalis, I., Ioannidis, K., Vrochidis, S. (2024). A Framework for 3D Modeling of Construction Sites Using Aerial Imagery and Semantic NeRFs. In: Rudinac, S., et al. MultiMedia Modeling. MMM 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14557. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53302-0_13

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53302-0_13

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-53301-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-53302-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics