Combining Machine Learning Techniques with Terrestrial Laser Scanning for Automatic Building Material Recognition

Automatic building material recognition has been a popular research interest over the past decade because it is useful for construction management and facility management. Currently, the extensively used methods for automatic material recognition are mainly based on 2D images. A terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) with a built-in camera can generate a set of coloured laser scan data that contains not only the visual features of building materials but also other attributes such as material reflectance and surface roughness. With more characteristics provided, laser scan data have the potential to improve the accuracy of building material recognition. Therefore, this research aims to develop a TLS-based building material recognition method by combining machine learning techniques. The developed method uses material reflectance, HSV colour values, and surface roughness as the features for material recognition. A database containing the laser scan data of common building materials was created and used for model training and validation with machine learning techniques. Different machine learning algorithms were compared, and the best algorithm showed an average recognition accuracy of 96.5%, which demonstrated the feasibility of the developed method.