6. Conclusion
Progressively captured and registered point clouds provide opportunities to capture a more complete view of the building components over time. A unique challenge of using registered point clouds is that registering point clouds that contain overlapping information might increase the difficulty of storing and processing registered point clouds due to file size. This paper presented an approach that evaluates the information contained in point clouds and supports the decision on which point clouds should be combined. Instead of registering all the point clouds together, the approach only combines the point clouds that contain less repetitive geometric information, which effectively reduces the file size of the final dataset and increases the usability of the data. Base on our validation experiment, the approach represented in this paper is capable of retrieve more geometric information (i.e., higher coverage ratio) using the least number of point clouds (i.e., less file size). Hence, our approach allows construction professionals to rapidly evaluate the information contained in progressive point clouds and selectively combine progressive captured point clouds to provide a complete set of geometric information with reduced file sizes for the BIM update.