Combination of Building Information Modeling and Infrared Point Cloud for Nondestructive Evaluation

Infrared thermography is a nondestructive evaluation technique that has emerged as a practical approach for energy audit, damage detection, and structural monitoring applications. Advancements in unmanned aerial vehicle technologies have increased the capabilities of infrared thermography and expedited the inspection process. Recently, applications of infrared imaging and Structure-from-Motion have been developed and demonstrated that it is possible to reconstruct point clouds from scalar fields containing emissivity and temperature values retrieved from the infrared images. This paper develops and quantifies the accuracy of a novel cloud-to-model tool that converts the emissivity scalar fields extracted from the point cloud into an analysis layer that can be imported into a building information modeling environment. The model developed allows for an intuitive interpretation of the collected data through the association between a single building component and a piece of the point cloud that describes its properties in the infrared range. In this paper, the accuracy of the proposed infrared-based approach is compared with the one of a point cloud generated using high-resolution digital images.