Specifying Volumes of Interest for Industrial Use Cases

Creating digital representations of industrial facilities presents substantial opportunities for the industry. The development of digital twins opens up many prospective applications for industrial plants, such as facilitating virtual training environments, streamlining change management, and providing real-time understanding of remote scenes. However, creating and maintaining these digital twins involves complex tasks, including scanning industrial plants and annotating their subsystems. Many use cases necessitate specifying a Volume of Interest (VoI) for further processing while presenting severe environmental challenges for segmentation quality and worker safety. Besides that, widespread adoption also depends on creating methods that are easy to use, even for workers with limited 3D interaction knowledge. Currently, no commonly implemented method fulfills all these diverse requirements. This paper introduces an approach for specifying a VoI in industrial scenarios. Our approach defines a volume by intersecting the projection of hand-drawn surroundings on a small number of pictures of the target volume, utilizing Augmented Reality and Voxel Carving. It can successfully handle various sizes of target volumes and delivers an appropriately detailed result. Applying qualitative discussions and a quantitative evaluation, we ensure our application meets all requirements posed by the scenarios. This simple interaction metaphor, tailored to specific use cases, can serve as a versatile pattern for various digital twin scenarios. It offers a valuable alternative to 3D primitive-based segmentation methods.