In collaboration with Historic Environment Scotland, we investigate various new reality capture technologies for supporting building surveyors in pro-active maintenance surveys. We also develop new algorithms to extract valuable information from this survey data. One of these is available as a plugin to CloudCompare (see below).

Videos

This video shows some results we have achieved for automatically segmenting ashlar and rubble masonty walls. While not easily shown, one important aspect of our approach, particularly for rubble walls, is that it doesn't assume that the wall is flat/planar.

Masonry Segmentation CloudCompare Plugin

The Masonry Segmentation CloudCompare Plugin, which is a plugin for CloudCompare that enables the segmentation of dense point clouds (principally from laser scanning) of masonry structures into their individual stones. The plugin, distributed under the GPLv2 license, can be found here.

Academic Publications

Year	Authors, date, title and journal	PDF	web
2025	Li J., Bosché F., Lu C. X., Wilson L., and Tao B. (2025). Slate detection in orthophotos of building roof panels. Proceedings of the International Symposium on Automation and Robotics in Construction (ISARC). Montréal, Canada.		web
2024	Li J., Tao B. and Bosché F. (2024). Automated generation and semantic segmentation of roof orthophoto for digital twin -based monitoring of slated roofs, Automation in Construction, 167:105725.		web
-	Kennedy C., Penman M., Watkinson D., Emmerson N., Thickett D., Bosché F., Forster A., Grau-Bové K., Cassar M. (2024), Beyond Heritage Science: A Review, Heritage, 7(3):1510-1538.		web
-	Li J., Tao B., Bosché F., Lu C., Wilson L. (2024), Extracting roof sub-components from orthophotos using deep-learning -based semantic segmentation, Proceedings of the 41st International Symposium on Automation and Robotics in Construction (ISARC), pp. 675-682, Lille, France.		web
2023	Forster A., Valero E., Bosché F., Hyslop E., Wilson L. (2023), "Digital Toolkit to Assist the Interpretation of Traditional Masonry Construction", International Journal of Architectural Heritage, 18(5):725-739.		web
-	Li J., Bosché F., Lu C., Wilson L. (2023), "Occlusion-free Orthophoto Generation for Building Roofs Using UAV Photogrammetric Reconstruction and Digital Twin Data", Proceedings of the 40th International Symposium on Automation and Robotics in Construction (ISARC), pp. 371-378, Chennai, India.		web
2020	Valero E., Bosché F., Forster A., M'Beirick I., Wilson L., Turmel A., Hyslop E. (2020), "Development of a novel open tool for the segmentation of 3D point clouds of masonry walls", STONE 2020, Germany.	PDF
2019	Valero E., Bosché F., Forster A., Hyslop E., Wilson L., & Turmel A. (2019), "Automated Defect Detection and Classification in Ashlar Masonry Walls using Machine Learning", Automation in Construction, Vol. 106, 102846.	PDF	web
2018	Valero, E., Bosché, F. & Forster, A., (2018), "Automatic Segmentation of 3D Point Clouds of Rubble Masonry Walls, and its Application to Building Surveying, Repair and Maintenance", Automation in Construction, Vol. 96, pp. 29-39.	PDF	web
-	Valero, E., Bosché, F., Forster, A., Hyslop, E. (2018). "Historic Digital Survey: Reality Capture and Automatic Data Processing for the Interpretation and Analysis of Historic Architectural Rubble Masonry", 11th International Conference on Structural Analysis of Historical Constructions (SAHC 2018), Cusco, Peru, Sep 11-13	PDF	web
-	Valero, E., Forster, A., Bosché, F., Renier, C., Hyslop, E., Wilson, L. (2018). "High Level-of-Detail BIM and Machine Learning for Automated Masonry Wall Defect Surveying", 35th International Symposium on Automation and Robotics in Construction (ISARC 2018), Berlin, Germany, Jul 20-25. Best Paper Award		web
2017	Valero, E., Bosché, F. N., Forster, A. M., Wilson, L., Leslie, A. (2017), "Evaluation of Historic Masonry: Towards Greater Objectivity and Efficiency", Book chapter in Heritage Building Information Modelling, 280 pages, Routledge.	PDF	web
2016	Valero, E., Bosché, F. N., Forster, A. M., Wilson, L., Leslie, A. (2016), "Comparison of 3D Reality Capture Technologies for the Survey of Stone Walls", Arqueológica 2.0, Valencia, Spain, Sep 5-7.	PDF	web

Books and Technical Reports

Year	Title, authors, details	PDF	web
2022	Bosché, F., Forster, A. M., Valero, E. (2022), "Technical Paper 38 - Digital documentation, computer vision and machine learning for masonry surveying and maintenance ", 40 pages,Technical Report prepared for Historic Enrivonment Scotland..		web
2017	Valero, E., Bosché, F. N., Forster, A. M., Wilson, L., Leslie, A. (2017), "Evaluation of Historic Masonry: Towards Greater Objectivity and Efficiency", Book chapter in Heritage Building Information Modelling, 280 pages, Routledge.	PDF	web
2015	Bosché F., Forster A., Valero E. (2015), 3D Surveying Technologies and Applications: Point Clouds and Beyond. Technical Report prepared for Historic Enrivonment Scotland.	PDF

Professional and Public Publications

Invited Talks

Awards

Partners