Point Cloud Data Conversion into Solid Models via Point-Based Voxelization

Automated conversion of point cloud data from laser scanning into formats appropriate for structural engineering holds great promise for exploiting increasingly available aerially and terrestrially based pixelized data for a wide range of surveying-related applications from environmental modeling to disaster management. This paper introduces a point-based voxelization method to automatically transform point cloud data into solid models for computational modeling. The fundamental viability of the technique is visually demonstrated for both aerial and terrestrial data. For aerial and terrestrial data, this was achieved in less than 30 s for data sets up to 650,000 points. In all cases, the solid models converged without any user intervention when processed in a commercial finite-element method program.