Digitization in road construction: automating as-built models

The classic workflow in road construction projects is manual, labor intensive and error-prone. This PhD aims at optimizing and automating several steps in this process, using state-of-the art techniques. On the one hand the PhD project will investigate the use of BIM standards that are slowly being adopted by the road construction industry, to optimize the workflow between clients, designers, engineering firms, construction workers and public authorities. On the other, the project will make use of regular photogrammetric 3D reconstructions from drone imagery to record the existing situation, keep track of the work, assess the quality and progress and build as-design models that are in accordance with GRB specs. Object detection and machine learning methods on both geometric and RGB data will be used to automate this process.