Scan2FEM – Automatic mesh generation of highway pavements from reality capture data

Abstract

An important use case for Digital Twins of roads is pavement distress prediction. One requirement for accurate simulations is a detailed pavement model as a foundation for finite element analysis. This model has to represent the as-is state of the road as closely as possible. This work presents a novel approach for 3D point cloud-to-pavement mesh generation for structural analysis applications. We evaluate our method on point clouds from different reality capture sources with varying densities and accuracies to showcase its robustness and provide insight into the maximum feasible resolution of a mesh generated using aerial platforms. Our approach can yield both structured and unstructured meshes for use in finite element simulations of the pavement.