Kinect Applications in Construction: From Tracking to Reconstruction

Research on the use of imaging in construction and building information modeling (BIM) is still in its early stages. Imaging has been investigated in reconstructing building models, construction quality assurance and progress monitoring, and construction safety. In this paper, we survey the recent construction applications employing the low-cost Microsoft Kinect RGB-D sensors, as well as possible opportunities for applying Kinect in construction industry. Then we discuss a Kinect system under development for detecting objects in commercial buildings for use in reverse engineering of building information models. The invention of the low-cost Microsoft Kinect sensor has led to availability of inexpensive high-resolution depth and visual (RGB) sensing for a wide range of applications. The complementary nature of the depth and visual (RGB) information in the Kinect sensor opens up new opportunities to solve fundamental problems in construction imagining, including object and activity recognition, people tracking, 3D mapping and localization, etc.