2nd Workshop and Challenge on COMPUTER VISION IN THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

Building on the success of the 1st workshop, the 2nd Workshop on Computer Vision in the Built Environment continous on connecting the domains of Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) with that of Computer Vision by establishing a common ground of interaction and identify shared research interests. . Specifically, this workshop focuses on the as-is semantic status of built environments and the changes that take place within them over time. These topics will be presented from the dual lens of Computer Vision and AEC-FM, highlighting the limitations and bottlenecks related to developing applications for this specific domain. The objective is for attendees to learn more about AEC-FM and the variety of real-world problems that, if solved, could have a tangible impact on this multi trillion dollar industry as well as the overall quality of life across the globe.

The workshop will begin by establishing ways to acquire the as-is status of a space in a granular and hierarchical way - some of the speakers are experts in acquiring the spatial layout whereas others focus on object categories and their attributes. Building on this static scene understanding, we introduce the impact of time, as change that is either explicitly observed (a human interacting with an object) or implicitly inferred (capturing the as-is status of a scene in different timestamps). The combination of the static and dynamic understanding of 3D scenes is at the core of AEC-FM industry and currently missing. One example is that architects typically design living spaces without any feedback from their previous designs. Another example is that 5-12% (this percentage corresponds annually to billions of dollars in the US alone) of non-estimated construction cost is due to rework that originates from misinterpretation of design documents and the dynamically changing environment of construction sites.

To further establish connections between the two domains and identify what we can do right now and what is still hard to solve, we will host the 2nd International Scan-to-BIM competition targeted on acquiring the semantic as-is status of buildings given their 3D point clouds. Specifically, we will focus on the tasks of floorplan reconstruction and 3D building model reconstruction and present appropriate interdisciplinary metrics for solving them. Last year we observed that a large gap remains before these problems can be considered solved and actually meet the needs of practitioners. We regard this workshop as the ideal environment for understanding the challenges and steps forward given that it provides convergence between the research and practical communities from multiple disciplines.