Lightweighting for Web3D visualization of large-scale BIM scenes in real-time

As a result of informatization in construction, Building Information Modeling (BIM) has now become a core technology for smart construction. We present a Web3D-based lightweighting solution for real-time visualization of large-scale BIM scenes, considering the redundancy, semantics, and the parameterization of BIM data under the limited resources of network bandwidth and web browsers. Taking the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) as the input data format, we firstly conduct a semantics-guided lightweighting operation on the raw BIM scenes by removing the repetitive objects and parameterizing the swept surfaces. Secondly, we extract the exterior products from the raw BIM buildings for visibility culling and construct a Double-Layered Sparse Voxel (DLSV) index based on sparse voxelization. Thirdly, we integrate the above two together into a new data structure named Incremental Frustum of Interest (I-FOI) to manage the scene data in real-time. Our experiments demonstrate that: (1) with the semantics information, our method is able to significantly reduce the redundancy of raw large-scale BIM scenes; (2) the DLSV structure supports progressive data loading and facilitates the indoor/outdoor visibility culling efficiently; and (3) the I-FOI introduces a frustum incremental-driven mechanism into progressive data loading or unloading to improve the efficiency of resource consumption. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.