4,919 research outputs found
Applications of Computer Vision Technologies of Automated Crack Detection and Quantification for the Inspection of Civil Infrastructure Systems
Many components of existing civil infrastructure systems, such as road pavement, bridges, and buildings, are suffered from rapid aging, which require enormous nation\u27s resources from federal and state agencies to inspect and maintain them. Crack is one of important material and structural defects, which must be inspected not only for good maintenance of civil infrastructure with a high quality of safety and serviceability, but also for the opportunity to provide early warning against failure. Conventional human visual inspection is still considered as the primary inspection method. However, it is well established that human visual inspection is subjective and often inaccurate. In order to improve current manual visual inspection for crack detection and evaluation of civil infrastructure, this study explores the application of computer vision techniques as a non-destructive evaluation and testing (NDE&T) method for automated crack detection and quantification for different civil infrastructures. In this study, computer vision-based algorithms were developed and evaluated to deal with different situations of field inspection that inspectors could face with in crack detection and quantification. The depth, the distance between camera and object, is a necessary extrinsic parameter that has to be measured to quantify crack size since other parameters, such as focal length, resolution, and camera sensor size are intrinsic, which are usually known by camera manufacturers. Thus, computer vision techniques were evaluated with different crack inspection applications with constant and variable depths. For the fixed-depth applications, computer vision techniques were applied to two field studies, including 1) automated crack detection and quantification for road pavement using the Laser Road Imaging System (LRIS), and 2) automated crack detection on bridge cables surfaces, using a cable inspection robot. For the various-depth applications, two field studies were conducted, including 3) automated crack recognition and width measurement of concrete bridges\u27 cracks using a high-magnification telescopic lens, and 4) automated crack quantification and depth estimation using wearable glasses with stereovision cameras. From the realistic field applications of computer vision techniques, a novel self-adaptive image-processing algorithm was developed using a series of morphological transformations to connect fragmented crack pixels in digital images. The crack-defragmentation algorithm was evaluated with road pavement images. The results showed that the accuracy of automated crack detection, associated with artificial neural network classifier, was significantly improved by reducing both false positive and false negative. Using up to six crack features, including area, length, orientation, texture, intensity, and wheel-path location, crack detection accuracy was evaluated to find the optimal sets of crack features. Lab and field test results of different inspection applications show that proposed compute vision-based crack detection and quantification algorithms can detect and quantify cracks from different structures\u27 surface and depth. Some guidelines of applying computer vision techniques are also suggested for each crack inspection application
Autonomous Robotic System using Non-Destructive Evaluation methods for Bridge Deck Inspection
Bridge condition assessment is important to maintain the quality of highway
roads for public transport. Bridge deterioration with time is inevitable due to
aging material, environmental wear and in some cases, inadequate maintenance.
Non-destructive evaluation (NDE) methods are preferred for condition assessment
for bridges, concrete buildings, and other civil structures. Some examples of
NDE methods are ground penetrating radar (GPR), acoustic emission, and
electrical resistivity (ER). NDE methods provide the ability to inspect a
structure without causing any damage to the structure in the process. In
addition, NDE methods typically cost less than other methods, since they do not
require inspection sites to be evacuated prior to inspection, which greatly
reduces the cost of safety related issues during the inspection process. In
this paper, an autonomous robotic system equipped with three different NDE
sensors is presented. The system employs GPR, ER, and a camera for data
collection. The system is capable of performing real-time, cost-effective
bridge deck inspection, and is comprised of a mechanical robot design and
machine learning and pattern recognition methods for automated steel rebar
picking to provide realtime condition maps of the corrosive deck environments
Benchmarking Image Processing Algorithms for Unmanned Aerial System-Assisted Crack Detection in Concrete Structures
This paper summarizes the results of traditional image processing algorithms for detection of defects in concrete using images taken by Unmanned Aerial Systems (UASs). Such algorithms are useful for improving the accuracy of crack detection during autonomous inspection of bridges and other structures, and they have yet to be compared and evaluated on a dataset of concrete images taken by UAS. The authors created a generic image processing algorithm for crack detection, which included the major steps of filter design, edge detection, image enhancement, and segmentation, designed to uniformly compare dierent edge detectors. Edge detection was carried out by six filters in the spatial (Roberts, Prewitt, Sobel, and Laplacian of Gaussian) and frequency (Butterworth and Gaussian) domains. These algorithms were applied to fifty images each of defected and sound concrete. Performances of the six filters were compared in terms of accuracy, precision, minimum detectable crack width, computational time, and noise-to-signal ratio. In general, frequency domain techniques were slower than spatial domain methods because of the computational intensity of the Fourier and inverse Fourier transformations used to move between spatial and frequency domains. Frequency domain methods also produced noisier images than spatial domain methods. Crack detection in the spatial domain using the Laplacian of Gaussian filter proved to be the fastest, most accurate, and most precise method, and it resulted in the finest detectable crack width. The Laplacian of Gaussian filter in spatial domain is recommended for future applications of real-time crack detection using UAS
Bridges Structural Health Monitoring and Deterioration Detection Synthesis of Knowledge and Technology
INE/AUTC 10.0
Automatic Crack Detection in Built Infrastructure Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
This paper addresses the problem of crack detection which is essential for
health monitoring of built infrastructure. Our approach includes two stages,
data collection using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and crack detection using
histogram analysis. For the data collection, a 3D model of the structure is
first created by using laser scanners. Based on the model, geometric properties
are extracted to generate way points necessary for navigating the UAV to take
images of the structure. Then, our next step is to stick together those
obtained images from the overlapped field of view. The resulting image is then
clustered by histogram analysis and peak detection. Potential cracks are
finally identified by using locally adaptive thresholds. The whole process is
automatically carried out so that the inspection time is significantly improved
while safety hazards can be minimised. A prototypical system has been developed
for evaluation and experimental results are included.Comment: In proceeding of The 34th International Symposium on Automation and
Robotics in Construction (ISARC), pp. 823-829, Taipei, Taiwan, 201
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