Between the Poles

Miniaturized imaging scanner captures CES Innovation Award

The Leica BLK360 has won a CES 2017 Innovation Award.  The BLK360 is a miniaturized 3D imaging laser scanner that weighs about a kilogram. It captures full-color panoramic images overlaid on a millimeter accuracy point cloud.  It shoots 360-degree high dynamic range (HDR) spherical imagery and combines it with a millimeter accuracy 3D laser point-cloud.  It is designed to simplify the reality capture process - the BLK360 has only one button. A complete 360° laser scan with panoramic image capture and transfer to the iPad Pro requires 3 minutes. BLK360 was created in tandem with a new version of the Autodesk ReCap 360 software that runs on the Apple iPad Pro.  It is intended to enable users to easily create, share and manipulate accurate 3-D models.

It collects 360,000 points per second and has a range of 60 meters with 4 mm accuracy.  In addition to a LiDAR sensor, the BLK360 includes infrared sensors for thermal imaging and 360° cameras.  It is completely wireless and streams image and point cloud data to an iPad.  With an anticipated retail price of the scanner and software is $15,990/€15,000, this imaging scanner lowers the entry barrier to precision laser scanning.

Completely automated classification of 3D scans by next year ?

Today's 3D scanners are able to generate 3D models in which humans can easily recognize objects such as vegetation, ground, buildings, power transformers, utility poles and cables, and windows and doors.  Automating this process of classifying point clouds or meshes, also known as feature extraction, will enable automation of many currently time consuming workflows in many industries.  In a panel discusion at the SPAR3D 2017 conference this year Greg Bentley, CEO of Bentley Systems, alluded to a Bentley-Microsoft project to apply machine learning to classifying reality meshes and hinted that we might see fully classified reality meshes demonstrated at next year's joint SPAR3D + AEC ST conference in Anaheim.

One example where automating feature extraction would provide big benefits is automating vegetation management for transmission lines.  Periodic transmission line inspection is mandated for North American transmission lines by NERC.  It is currently carried out by helicopter-born LiDAR which is expensive and for that reason not done more often than is required by NERC.  Full automation, which is possible with beyond-visual-line-of-site (BVLOS) autonomous UAVs and automated feature extraction of lines, pylons, vegetation and ground, would dramatically reduce the cost of inspection and enable more frequent flyovers.  The major benefits would be lower costs and a reduction in the number and length of outages resulting from vegetation transmission line interactions.

The latest 3D scanners, which are capable of creating high precision photorealistic models of just about anything, from digital terrain models and cities to detailed models of cathedrals, are getting much more affordable and accessible.  The current lowest price point is about $400 to $450 for adding 3D scanning capability to a tablet.  In the future 3D scanning and imaging may simply be built into smart phones.  Automating feature extraction from the exponentially increasing volume of 3D data, whether point clouds or meshes, is going to grow in importance.

But automating feature recognition and extraction from a point cloud or mesh remains a challenge.  Researchers have attempted to use machines to recognize features in imagery ever since computers were able to manipulate and analyze raster data.  There are cases where imagery contains a restricted set of types of objects in a known environment which makes feature recognition simpler.  For example, identifying icebergs in satellite or overflight imagery of the North Atlantic.  As another example, in a refinery or a chemical plant most of the objects are pipes, structural steel, and ducts.  For this type or environment with well-defined geometrical objects, software such as Trimble RealWorks (TRW) can identify walls, floors and ceilings inside buildings and ground, buildings, vegetation, and curbs and gutters outside.  At SPAR3D it was announced that the latest version of TRW 10.3 can even resolve power lines, which is critical for automating vegetation management for transmission lines.

I have blogged about Indoor Reality who have developed technology that can track accurately the location and orientation (six degrees of freedom) of a backpack containing LIDAR and other sensors as the operator walks through a building going into rooms, halls, up and down stairs and into other human accessible spaces.  Software tools are provided to generate intelligent triangulated mesh surfaces.  The package includes analytical software tools for automatically generating floor plans, distinguishing rooms, identifying staircases, and identifying doors and windows, in fact, everything needed for a Revit model of the interior of the building.

But for general imagery automating feature extraction typically follows the Pareto principle - extracting 80% of the features is easy, but the remaining 20% is difficult and requires most of the effort.  Currently companies such as Clearedge offer specialized software, Edgewise, for classification of 3D imagery.  Trimble has licensed Edgewise from Clearedge for construction applications and it can be used to extract pipes, conduits, structural steel, ducts, structural concrete, walls, windows and doors from 3D scans.  But the current algorithms are not able to classify everything and the process remains semi-automated - Clearedge claims that in general Edgewise can speed up the process of feature extraction by 70 %.  I am looking forward with extreme interest to seeing fully classified reality meshes demonstrated, perhaps as early as next year's joint SPAR3D + AEC ST conference in Anaheim.

Democratizing 3D scanning to non-surveyor professionals

At the SPAR3D 2017 conference, Burkhard Boeckem, CTO of Hexagon Geosystems, gave a vision of the future of 3D technologies developed by technology firms such as Hexagon.  Among the well-known brands that form Hexagon Geosystems is Leica Geosystems, which recently introduced two new ground-breaking LiDAR scanners, the SPL100 and the BLK360. These devices are targeted on very different markets.   He used these devices as examples of how a new technology becomes democratized among a much broader professional community than the small number of specialists it was initially targeted on.

By way of background, up until recently LiDAR scanning was pretty well restricted to the surveying community and a few other specialist groups.  Leica has made LiDAR devices for these specialist communities for over a decade.

Single photon LiDAR is a new technology that differs from the current waveform LiDAR mainstream in that it can detect weaker reflected light where current devices need much stronger light.  The SPL100 is a single photon LiDAR sensor that collects 6 million points per second which means that planes can fly higher and still collect 12 - 30 points per square meter, depending on flying height.  Leica says it is 10 times more efficient than conventional waveform LiDAR sensors for this type of mapping.  The SPL100 is initially targeted on a very specialist, exclusive group of mapping professionals who scan large areas - states, countries and regions. 

In contrast the BLK360 is a very small (1 kg) imaging LiDAR scanner, which is targeted on a potentially much broader professional audience for 3D data, including many people who haven't heard of LiDAR or even considered whether 3D data might help them. It is very simple to use - it has only one button.  It can complete a full 360 scan of a space with a range of 60 meters in three minutes.  All subsequent processing of the point cloud and imagery to visualize the data is performed on an iPad.  The BLK360 is the culmination of laser scanning development at Leica which began in the early 2000s targeting the surveyor community.   The BLK360 is intended to dramatically expand the domain of users of high precision 3D data.

Burkhard Boeckem used these two devices as a model for how he sees new technology first being developed and introduced for specialist professionals and then being democratized among the broader professional market. 

Looking toward the future he sees single photon LiDAR and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) as important breakthrough technologies that are very new and are only now being introduced into the specialist market. For GNSS-denied areas such as inside buildings, tunnels and mines Leica has just introduced the Pegasus Backpack which relies on SLAM to track the wearer in a building or other areas where GNSS does not penetrate.  The Pegasus Backpack appears to be targeted currently on a relatively small market of specialists.  Based on 15 years of laser scanning development at Leica, Burkhard Boeckem's message is that by analogy with the process that culminated in the BLK360, in the future we will likely see very simple "one-button" devices descended from the Pegasus Backpack and the SPL100 aimed at the broader professional market.

Getting technologies like the BLK360 out to people who could benefit from 3D data has become the current challenge according to Shabtay Negry, Senior Vice President at Mantis Vision who manufacture one of the earliest handheld 3D scanners and whose 3D technology is used in the Google Tango project.  The target for the BLK360 and other small, easy to use, and inexpensive devices are professionals who could benefit from  3D technology.  The introduction of the Xbox 360 Kinect in 2010 lowered the technology price bar for 3D scanners.  The Kinect and many of the low end scanners currently on the market use very inexpensive infrared plus photography technology to create 3D point clouds with associated images. As an example, the Matterport Pro, which lists for $3600, is such a device targeted on Real Estate professionals.  With these types of devices Shabtay Negry expects the 3D market to expand by 100,000 units in two to three years.  As examples of the types of professionals for whom 3D technology provides benefits he mentioned plumbers, upholsterers, insurance adjusters and many more.  Honeywell Logistics, who are not 3D specialists, use 3D scanning for space optimization.  Price as a barrier to the adoption of 3D scanners has been virtually eliminated.  The Structure sensor is $400 and attaches to iPad devices.  Mantis Vision promises to make its technology available for everyone - being able to scan an object, share the 3D model online, and send it to a 3D printer—from a smartphone.  Mantis Vision was working with the Google Tango project (now deprecated and replaced by ARCore) to make 3D scanning available on an Android tablet.

Are point clouds going away ?

At the SPAR3D 2017 conference in Houston, one of the interesting questions posed to a panel comprised of Greg Bentley (CEO of Bentley), Burkhard Boeckem (CTO of Hexagon Geosystems), and Shabtay Negry (Senior VP at Mantis Vision) is whether point clouds, whether from digital photography or LiDAR, will effectively disappear, being replaced by meshes for most reality modeling applications.  Meshes are mathematical constructs, typically 3D triangular networks, that are smaller and much easier to manipulate than point clouds, which are typically huge and a challenge to edit.
 
I blogged previously about a digital model comprised of meshes of downtown Philadelphia that was used to orchestrate and secure the Papal visit.  All the data was collected as photographs which were then used to create a single reality mesh using Bentley ContextCapture.  At SPAR3D there are presentations on two other projects which used a similar approach to create models of the city of Helsinki and the Cologne Cathedral.

Another fascinating example is the USS Arizona digital project which combined underwater lidar, sonar, aerial imaging, and existing photography and surveys to produce a survey-grade 3D model of the USS Arizona in the form of a mesh using Autodesk Remake.  Surveys were conducted in 2014 and 2016.  Just recently the two digital mesh models of the ship were compared to create a difference mesh to show areas where there has been change in the two years since 2014.

At SPAR3D there was a consensus among the panelists that meshes are replacing point clouds for most applications. Point clouds are just too big and have too little intelligence. They will remain as an intermediate data type because most scanners generate point clouds.  Replacing point clouds for many applications meshes will grow in importance in the future.  But realizing their full potential will require interactive, editable meshes that allow small bits to be changed or replaced without having to regenerate the entire mesh (which is often the case with triangulated surfaces).  Easy to use analytic tools like those used to create the difference map of the Arizona will also be required.  The panelists thought that with the appropriate edit and analytic tools people will be able to manipulate surfaces easily and may not  even be aware of what the form of the underlying data structures is.  Smaller files will also make cloud processing easier because in the future huge point cloud files won't have to be uploaded to the cloud.

Mixed reality in the construction industry is becoming a reality

At the SPAR3D 2017 conference in Houston, I had the distinct feeling that we are on the cusp of an important inflection point where technology has evolved to the point that it is going to transform the world's construction sector.  Handheld scanners and mixed reality are two of the technologies that are set to revolutionize construction.  According to Gartner mixed reality is poised to attain what Gartner calls the plateau of productivity where a new technology is applied to real-world problems on a global scale.

In many countries with advanced economies the construction sector, which contributes about $ 10 trillion annually to the world's GDP, has not experienced improvement in productivity for 50 years.  During this same period productivity in the non-farm general industrial sector has more than doubled.  That means that the value produced by an hour of a construction worker's time is the same now as it was 50 years ago, whereas an automobile worker produces more than twice as much value as 50 years ago.  If infrastructure is going to attract the private investment from pension funds, insurance companies, and sovereign wealth funds that is required to maintain and build out the infrastructure we need over the next couple of decades, construction productivity has to improve.  The goal of improving productivity will drive investment in technology.  According to McKinsey the construction industry is poised for rapid digitization. Examples of the technology that is set to digitize and transform the construction industry were demonstrated at SPAR3D this year.

At this year's SPAR3D three companies in the construction sector, Gensler (a collaborative design firm), McCarthy (a commercial construction firm), and Martin Brothers Construction (a heavy civil construction firm), demonstrated how they were using mixed reality on real-world projects.  The tools they used include Enscape, Revizto, Revit, Sketchup Pro, Unity, 3dsMax, Umbra, Hololens, Sketchup Viewer on Hololens, Oculus and HTC Vive.  The application that wasn't shown this year, but I hope will be next year at SPAR3D, is Fuzor.

Cody Nowak of Martin Brothers demonstrated building a bathroom pod with Hololens.  The bathroom pod was designed using a standard design application sush as Revit or Sketchup, then projected onto the reality of a shop floor were it was constructed using the full-scale virtual reality projection of the design into the shop.

Gensler described collaborative design where two or more designers and stake holders can share a mixed reality space where they work collaboratively on a design.

McCarthy demonstrated how easy it was to work in a virtual reality space with a headset and handheld controllers.  They asked a member of the audience with no mixed reality experience to don the headset and controllers.  Within a few minutes she was able to move around in the virtual reality - we could see what she saw on a separate screen.  Using the handheld controllers she was also able to move things around in the virtual space.  She moved furniture and furnishings on the wall.  She even threw a stool across the virtual room.

Many of these mixed reality visualizations can be used on handhelds.  Workers in the field or during operations and maintenance can use these applications to inspect and query facilities to access inspection and maintenance reports for equipment they point at in a mixed reality environment.

The next step, which was not demonstrated at SPAR3D this year but I expect will be next year, is bidirectional communication link between the mixed reality environment and the authoring design tool, whether Revit or Sketchup.  This will make it possible for changes made in the mixed reality environment to be visible in Revit or Sketchup where they can be incorporated in the design.  The reverse of this is where design changes in Revit or Sketchup are visible in real-time in the mixed reality environment.

The key elements of mixed reality as it applies to the construction industry are

• bidirectional link between the mixed reality environment and the design tool enabling users to design in their authoring software and view the changes to their design in real time as well as create design changes directly in the mixed reality environment and send those changes back into their authoring software.
• mobile applications of mixed reality for people in the field or in an operating environment
• real-time collaboration in a mixed reality environment independently or simultaneously from anywhere on the globe from a computer or mobile device

We want to be able to don our VR gear and visualize the model we are working on. If there are design changes, we want to be able to make and update them in real time and then jump right back into the mixed reality environment.  We also want guests to be able to view the our design changes in the mixed reality environment as we make them.  Stakeholders need to be able to explore, review and modify projects independently or simultaneously from anywhere on the globe from their computer or mobile device.  We need real-time collaboration to actively review a design with stakeholders, or let collaborators review and make changes to the model in real-time.  This is not pie-in-the-sky dreams, people are doing these things already with the software tools I mentioned above.  I don't think the question is if, it is how rapidly these tools will proliferate in the construction industry.  BIM and digital scanning of different types have already proliferated over the globe and I expect with this digital foundation, these newer tools will spread even faster.

New standard for locating underground infrastructure launched

The new PAS 256 standard "Buried services – Collection, recording and sharing of location information  data", which complements the existing PAS 128 standard, was launched last night at the Institution of Civil Engineers in London.  It is available at the BSI shop.

In the UK the total length of buried infrastructure is in excess of 4 million kilometres. The new PAS provides best practices for the collection, recording and sharing of location information data relating to underground assets and any associated above ground assets; decommissioned assets; and abandoned assets.The PAS sets out a consistent, accessible data protocol to enable effective recording and sharing of the location, state, and nature of buried assets, and recommends how existing asset  records should be updated, recorded and collated. The PAS also covers the gathering of geospatial data using absolute or relative accuracy, plus associated evidence such as photographic evidence.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has announced the initiation of a three-phase project to develop interoperability standards for underground infrastructure. The underground infrastructure data interoperability project will take two and a half years to complete and will involve the collaboration of many cities, utilities, and engineering and technology companies.

In the U.S. it is estimated that an underground utility is hit about every minute.  Underground utility conflicts and relocations are the number one cause for project delays during road construction.  Assuming the average cost of underground strikes is roughly $1000 per strike, the estimated total cost to the U.S. economy is $1.5 trillion annually.

The new PAS 256 standard "Buried services – Collection, recording and sharing of location information  data", which complements the existing PAS 128 standard, was launched last night at the Institution of Civil Engineers in London.  It is available at the BSI shop.

In the UK the total length of buried infrastructure is in excess of 4 million kilometres. The new PAS provides best practices for the collection, recording and sharing of location information data relating to underground assets and any associated above ground assets; decommissioned assets; and abandoned assets.The PAS sets out a consistent, accessible data protocol to enable effective recording and sharing of the location, state, and nature of buried assets, and recommends how existing asset  records should be updated, recorded and collated. The PAS also covers the gathering of geospatial data using absolute or relative accuracy, plus associated evidence such as photographic evidence.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has announced the initiation of a three-phase project to develop interoperability standards for underground infrastructure. The underground infrastructure data interoperability project will take two and a half years to complete and will involve the collaboration of many cities, utilities, and engineering and technology companies.

In the U.S. it is estimated that an underground utility is hit about every minute.  Underground utility conflicts and relocations are the number one cause for project delays during road construction.  Assuming the average cost of underground strikes is roughly $1000 per strike, the estimated total cost to the U.S. economy is $1.5 trillion annually.

Handheld 3D scanners rapidly approaching consumer pricing

I have just spent an incredible three days in Houston at the SPAR3D 2017 conference.  There is so much going on right now in the 3D world with several key technologies just coming to fruition and finding broad application in the real world. 

 

Many see handheld scanners as potentially revolutionizing the construction sector.  Handheld scanners had a high profile at SPAR3D this year, with several vendors showing new products and many promising future products in the $400 price range.  One vendor is already selling a 3D imaging product that attaches to an iPad and sells for $400.

 

First exhibited at the 2013 SPAR3D, Dot Product has released a products DPI-8 and DPI-8X (short range) similar in its basic technology, multisensor (IR and photo cameras) to their first handheld.  I saw it first at the SPAR3D 2014 conference. Targetted at professionals, especially in the engineering and construction sector, their latest product incorporates SLAM and works with Android handhelds and tablets.  All the processing is done locally on the handheld - no cloud processing is required.  The captured point clouds are small - you can even cull the point clouds on the fly. The working range of the DPI-8 is from 0.6 m to 3.7 m. It export in PTS, PTX, PLY, and PTG. Binary files integrate directly with AVEVA LFM, Autodesk ReCap, Trimble RealWorks, CloudCompare,  ClearEdge3D, Veesus Arena4D, and PanoMap. The DPI-8X lists for US$ 5150.  Dot Product has been working with Google on Project Tango and says there is a $450 scanner in the future.

Mantis Vision has also offered a handheld scanner F5 for professionals for several years.  Their latest offering is the Mantis Vision F5-SR scanner/imager. It has a range from 0.5 meters (m) up to 4.5 m with an accuracy of a few millimeters (mm).  It also relies on IR and photo cameras.  It uses triangulation to locate objects and is in lower end of the the F5 price range of $20-50,000.  Mantis Vision promises to make its technology available for everyone - being able to scan an object, share the 3D model online, and send it to a 3D printer—from a smartphone.  At the end of May Mantis Vision will be releasing a new scanner, the F6 at a price of $15,000.  The F6 can perform dynamic as well as static scanning and it is possible to scan collaboratively with up to 16 of the devices.

 

A handheld scanner that garnered a lot of attention at SPAR3D was the Matterport Pro from Matterport Immersive Media Systems.    Originally targetted on the real estate industry, the Matterport Pro allows you to scan a house in an hour or less, upload the captured data to the cloud (Amazon Web Services) and a couple of hours later you will have a fully-rendered model that can be used for walkthroughs with potential buyers.  It provides a dollhouse view to see a whole property at once, an inside view for walkthroughs, and a floorplan view for a traditional top-down perspective. It relies on IR and photo cameras.  It is pretty well restricted to indoor scans and requires multiple scans for a room - scanning every 1.5 to 2.5 meters.  It is claimed to be 95.5 % accurate - it can be used for measurement for sales not for engineering or construction purposes.  Its biggest advantages are the speed with which you can scan a house, for example, and the small size of the resulting file.  It can also provide a 3D context for facilities management.  For example, it can provide a mechanical room walk through with tags on different pieces of equipment and a way of directing anyone to any location in the facility.   The Matterport Pro 3D Camera lists for US$ 3600.00 plus US$ 49/mo to US$ 149/mo for cloud processing.

 

I have already blogged about the Leica Geosystems BLK360 which includes Autodesk Recap Pro.  It is a bit of a stretch to call it a handheld scanner but it weighs only 2.2 lbs (1 kg) and is incredibly small 6.5 inches (in) by 4 in.  Unlike the other devices described here it is a full laser scanner and imager. It captures 360,000 points/second with a range of 0.6 - 60 meters.  It has one button and can capture a full 360 degree scan in less than 3 minutes.  All aspects of the operation of the scanner can be controlled remotely from an iPad Pro.  It can perform all the processing required for visualization in the field on an iPad Pro.  It lists for US$16,000 and includes a one year license for Recap Pro. 

 

I blogged about the Faro Freestyle previously.  It can scan objects within a range of half a meter to 3 meters away with a resolution of  better than 1.5mm with a image point density of up to 45,000 points/m² at 0.5m and up to 10,500 points/m² at 1m.  The scanner is attached to a Microsoft Surface Pro tablet for visualizing the point cloud as you scan.  It sells for $11,000 to $12,000.  It is targetted on the architecture, accident reconstruction, civil engineering, construction, facility management, and industrial manufacturing sectors.

 

The least expensive scanner shown at SPAR3D was the Structure sensor with Canvas software from Occipital.  A new screw-on lens increases the field of view to 120º so that it requires fewer scans to capture a room.  Its range is 0.3 - 5 meters with a precision of 0.17%. It is targetted on the home owner as well as interior designers, architects, and contractors.  It can be used to capture 3D models of interiors, share them, measure with them or convert them to formats supported by AutoCAD and Sketchup.  The vendor offers a Scan To CAD service, that converts scans into editable CAD files (.skp, .dwg and .dae) for use with  tools like SketchUp, AutoCAD, and Revit.  It retails for $379 - $499 and attaches to several models of iPad including the iPad mini 4.  At the end of April it will be possible to purchase Bridge, a headset that makes it possible to mix real world and virtual realities with an iPhone.

Autonomous UAVs using SLAM to navigate without GPS

I have just spent an incredible three days in Houston at the SPAR3D 2017 conference.  There is so much going on right now in the 3D world with several key technologies just coming to fruition and finding broad application in the real world. 

 

One of them is Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) technology.  In 2012 a company called GeoSLAM, which was a joint venture with Australia's National Science Agency (CSIRO), began marketing a SLAM-based solution developed by CSIRO.  I blogged about a backpack solution for indoor mapping that Avideh Zakhor from the University of California Berkeley had developed for navigating inside a building, generating floor plans, distinguishing rooms, identifying staircases, texture mapping surfaces, identifying windows, finding heat sources such as computers and human occupants, identifying lights, and even estimating plug load lower consumption - all automatically.

 

At this year's SPAR3D conference Stefan Hrabar from CSIRO described a project he has been working on that combines autonomous navigation with LiDAR-based SLAM to enable drones to safely navigate autonomously without GNSS in areas with complex geometrical structures.  This enables missions that the UAV can do with no pilot intervention.  Some examples that have been implemented include rainforest surveys - looking for invasive species, telco (cell phone) tower inspection and mapping, construction site monitoring including inside buildings, and underground mine mapping, especially, vertical, hard to access shafts called stopes.  For example, Stefan showed a demonstration of telco tower mapping where the UAV was placed near a telco tower, a button pushed to initiate the flight, and the drone mapped the tower without any human intervention.

 

Hovermap is the CSIRO application that provides a SLAM-based 3D LiDAR mapping payload for small UAVs.  It provides omnidirectional collision avoidance, advanced autonomy, and the ability to operate in GNSS-denied areas.  Hovermap uses a rotating LiDAR to produce a virtual spherical shield around the UAV.  Real-time SLAM makes it possible for the drone to navigate in complex geometric environments  without GPS, while the on-board autonomy makes possible mission execution without human intervention.  Some aplications include construction site mapping (inside buildings and outside), underground mine mapping and transmission line mapping and monitoring.

Private infrastructure funding and investment

Until 2004 almost all the funding of investment projects was by governments and traditional lending institutions, primarily commercial banks. Pure financial investors were almost absent as equity investors in major infrastructure projects. Global  infrastructure  fundraising  for  private  equity  investments  in  infrastructure began in  2004.  In  2007, just before the global financial crisis, this type of fundraising had reached  $39.7 billion.  This was  15% of  the total infrastructure project  finance loans  that year.  After the financial crisis,  fundraising for private equity investments dropped significantly to about 10.5% of total project finance loans. Fundraising set a post-Great Financial Crisis (GFC) high in 2015, but the midyear total for 2016 already exceeded that.

Sources of private equity

The primary pure financial investors in equity for infrastructure are pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and insurance companies.  According  to  the  OECD, total assets held by pension funds globally was US$ 16.2 trillion. The top 70 insurance companies hold $20.7 trillion in assets.  Sovereign wealth funds hold an estimated $7.3-7.4 trillion in assets.

The OECD has estimated that the  total  commitment of  pension  funds to  infrastructure  in  2008 was $400 billion, primarily utilities,  but with around $60 billion invested in infrastructure other than utilities. An OECD  survey  of  large  pension  funds in 2013 showed that some funds had allocated important percentages to infrastructure.

The majority of sovereign wealth funds have infrastructure investments. A  recent  paper reported  that with total assets of $5.2tn  at  the  end  of 2012, sovereign wealth funds had invested $52 billion in infrastructure  between  2005  and 2012.  In 2013, the OECD surveyed a sample of the most important sovereign wealth funds worldwide and found that the percentage allocation of assets to infrastructure was signifiant with some reaching 10 - 12% of assets.

There are about  200  insurance companies worldwide with investments in infrastructure. Most of these are  located  in  Europe  and the USA,  with   about 20%  of  them in Asia. Insurance  companies typically invest in primary equity.

The Towers Watson and Financial Times’ Investor Survey 2013 reported that, out of the $3.1 trillion total assets under management by the top 100 investment asset managers, $127.6 billion was invested in  infrastructure.  It was also found that pension funds and sovereign wealth funds were  the most heavily invested  in infrastructure with 9% and 10% of their total assets, respectively.

According to the Willis Towers Watson Global Alternative Investment Assets Survey 2016, almost all private financial institutions are either not yet invested in infrastructure or are below their target allocation, but the demand is there.  According to Willis Towers Watson, "the reality is that the requirement for private investment in infrastructure is immense in all geographic regions."

Sources

Private Equity Institutional Investor Trends for 2016, Probitas Partners

PRIVATE FINANCING AND GOVERNMENT SUPPORT TO PROMOTE LONG-TERM INVESTMENTS IN INFRASTRUCTURE

Global Alternative Investment Assets Survey 2016 – Report Summary

Pension Fund Investment in Infrastructure OECD

World's Top Insurance Companies