Adaptive Visualisation System for Construction Building Information Models Using Saliency

Building Information Modeling (BIM) is a recent construction process based on a 3D model, containing every component related to the building achievement. Architects, structure engineers, method engineers, and others participant to the building process work on this model through the design-to-construction cycle. The high complexity and the large amount of information included in these models raise several issues, delaying its wide adoption in the industrial world. One of the most important is the visualization: professionals have difficulties to find out the relevant information for their job. Actual solutions suffer from two limitations: the BIM models information are processed manually and insignificant information are simply hidden, leading to inconsistencies in the building model. This paper describes a system relying on an ontological representation of the building information to label automatically the building elements. Depending on the user’s department, the visualization is modified according to these labels by automatically adjusting the colors and image properties based on a saliency model. The proposed saliency model incorporates several adaptations to fit the specificities of architectural images.