Abstract:
In the United Kingdom (UK), recent developments in the construction industry have
increased the demand for digitised infrastructure, which facilitates the investigation of
the as-is performance of assets. This establishes the need to create and maintain up-todate
digital copies of infrastructure assets, often labelled as Digital Twins. Digital twins
are obtained by converting the unstructured data formats of the real-world assets, such
as point clouds, into high-level digital representations. Yet, only few assets today have
usable digital twins because of the high costs of the latter. This counteracts the benefits
of the twins and reduces dramatically their true potential. Hence, there is a pressuring
need to automate the process of creating digital twins. Geometric digital twin, the most
basic form of the twin, contains only the geometry of the physical asset. This paper
reviews the work done in computer vision, geometry processing, and civil engineering
fields to determine the potential that exists for automatically producing geometric digital
twins of infrastructure.
