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A project of Professor Anthony Yeh of the Department of Urban Planning and Design and Dr. Frank Xue of the Department of Real Estates and Construction from the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Hong Kong (HKU) has been awarded the First Prize of the 2023 Survey and Mapping Science and Technology Award. An award ceremony was held on November 9 during the first China Surveying and Mapping Geographic Information Congress held in Deqing, Zhejiang.

Presented by the Chinese Society for Geodesy, Photogrammetry, and Cartography (CSGPC), the national accolade is to recognise remarkable contributions to China’s surveying and mapping geographical information science, key technological innovations and development, significant promotions of scientific and technological achievements, industrialization of advanced technology, mega engineering projects, and popularization of science.

The HKU team is the only team from Hong Kong to receive the award. The award-winning project, titled “Key Digital Technologies and Applications for Cultural Heritage Conservation in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area,” aims to develop and apply digital technologies that extract the shared cultural “genes” of Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Macao. The project team is developing a Lingnan cultural gene database by using 3D real scenes, digitisation, and automated creation of BIM models of heritage buildings in the Greater Bay Area. This will enable a cloud service platform for the co-creation, sharing, and demonstration of shared culture and heritage elements of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.

This multi-disciplinary team also featured members from Guangzhou Okay Information Technology Ltd, Guangdong Antique Archaeology Institute, Guangzhou Urban Planning and Design Survey Research Institute, and Sun Yat-Sen University.

The HKU team developed two innovative technologies for the award-winning project. The first innovation was a four-level theoretical automation framework of heritage building information modeling (HBIM) reconstruction guided by architectural grammar, which also received a Merit Paper Award from the CRIOCM2020 international conference.

Additionally, the team developed an HBIM automation software in Python language for processing 3D point clouds of heritage buildings, with features like section partitioning, local patch morphological clustering, registration of similar components, and semantic relationship generation. This software is a key technology of the award-winning project and also received an Outstanding Paper Award of CRIOCM2023 international conference.

“The technologies utilise 3D point cloud data, scanned from both interior and exterior of heritage buildings, using state-of-the-art terrestrial or mobile LiDAR devices. With the help of innovative advanced HBIM automation software developed by HKU, users can effortlessly choose from a variety of common components, such as timber door leaves and pillars, to enable the automatic creation of HBIM objects and their semantic relations, making the reconstruction process more efficient and user-friendly,” explained Professor Yeh.

“The technologies can be applied to automatic reconstruction of BIM models for existing buildings for city information modeling (CIM), to enable new smart simulations and analytics for sustainable city development.” Dr Xue added.

Please click here for more details about the award.

Media enquiries
Communication and Public Affairs Office, HKU
Ms Melanie Wan (Tel: 2859 2600 / Email: melwkwan@hku.hk)
Ms Jaymee Ng (Tel: 3910 3612 / Email: ngjaymee@hku.hk)
Mr Kenneth Choi (Tel: 2859 2607 / Email: khkchoi@hku.hk)