Artificial Intelligence in Civil Infrastructure Health Monitoring—historical Perspectives, Current Trends, and Future Visions

Over the past 2 decades, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) has exponentially increased toward complete automation of structural inspection and assessment tasks. This trend will continue to rise in image processing as unmanned aerial systems (UAS) and the internet of things (IoT) markets are expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 57.5% and 26%, respectively, from 2021 to 2028. This paper aims to catalog the milestone development work, summarize the current research trends, and envision a few future research directions in the innovative application of AI in civil infrastructure health monitoring. A blow-by-blow account of the major technology progression in this research field is provided in a chronological order. Detailed applications, key contributions, and performance measures of each milestone publication are presented. Representative technologies are detailed to demonstrate current research trends. A road map for future research is outlined to address contemporary issues such as explainable and physics-informed AI. This paper will provide readers with a lucid memoir of the historical progress, a good sense of the current trends, and a clear vision for future research

A Systematic Review of Convolutional Neural Network-Based Structural Condition Assessment Techniques

With recent advances in non-contact sensing technology such as cameras, unmanned aerial and ground vehicles, the structural health monitoring (SHM) community has witnessed a prominent growth in deep learning-based condition assessment techniques of structural systems. These deep learning methods rely primarily on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The CNN networks are trained using a large number of datasets for various types of damage and anomaly detection and post-disaster reconnaissance. The trained networks are then utilized to analyze newer data to detect the type and severity of the damage, enhancing the capabilities of non-contact sensors in developing autonomous SHM systems. In recent years, a broad range of CNN architectures has been developed by researchers to accommodate the extent of lighting and weather conditions, the quality of images, the amount of background and foreground noise, and multiclass damage in the structures. This paper presents a detailed literature review of existing CNN-based techniques in the context of infrastructure monitoring and maintenance. The review is categorized into multiple classes depending on the specific application and development of CNNs applied to data obtained from a wide range of structures. The challenges and limitations of the existing literature are discussed in detail at the end, followed by a brief conclusion on potential future research directions of CNN in structural condition assessment

D5.1 SHM digital twin requirements for residential, industrial buildings and bridges

This deliverable presents a report of the needs for structural control on buildings (initial imperfections, deflections at service, stability, rheology) and on bridges (vibrations, modal shapes, deflections, stresses) based on state-of-the-art image-based and sensor-based techniques. To this end, the deliverable identifies and describes strategies that encompass state-of-the-art instrumentation and control for infrastructures (SHM technologies).Objectius de Desenvolupament Sostenible::8 - Treball Decent i Creixement EconòmicObjectius de Desenvolupament Sostenible::9 - Indústria, Innovació i InfraestructuraPreprin

Review on smartphone sensing technology for structural health monitoring

Sensing is a critical and inevitable sector of structural health monitoring (SHM). Recently, smartphone sensing technology has become an emerging, affordable, and effective system for SHM and other engineering fields. This is because a modern smartphone is equipped with various built-in sensors and technologies, especially a triaxial accelerometer, gyroscope, global positioning system, high-resolution cameras, and wireless data communications under the internet-of-things paradigm, which are suitable for vibration- and vision-based SHM applications. This article presents a state-of-the-art review on recent research progress of smartphone-based SHM. Although there are some short reviews on this topic, the major contribution of this article is to exclusively present a compre- hensive survey of recent practices of smartphone sensors to health monitoring of civil structures from the per- spectives of measurement techniques, third-party apps developed in Android and iOS, and various application domains. Findings of this article provide thorough understanding of the main ideas and recent SHM studies on smartphone sensing technology

Geospatial Information Research: State of the Art, Case Studies and Future Perspectives

Geospatial information science (GI science) is concerned with the development and application of geodetic and information science methods for modeling, acquiring, sharing, managing, exploring, analyzing, synthesizing, visualizing, and evaluating data on spatio-temporal phenomena related to the Earth. As an interdisciplinary scientific discipline, it focuses on developing and adapting information technologies to understand processes on the Earth and human-place interactions, to detect and predict trends and patterns in the observed data, and to support decision making. The authors – members of DGK, the Geoinformatics division, as part of the Committee on Geodesy of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, representing geodetic research and university teaching in Germany – have prepared this paper as a means to point out future research questions and directions in geospatial information science. For the different facets of geospatial information science, the state of art is presented and underlined with mostly own case studies. The paper thus illustrates which contributions the German GI community makes and which research perspectives arise in geospatial information science. The paper further demonstrates that GI science, with its expertise in data acquisition and interpretation, information modeling and management, integration, decision support, visualization, and dissemination, can help solve many of the grand challenges facing society today and in the future

The PFILSTM model: a crack recognition method based on pyramid features and memory mechanisms

Crack detection is a crucial task for the structural health diagnosis of buildings. The current widely used manual inspection methods have inherent limitations and safety hazards, while traditional digital image processing methods require manual feature extraction and also have substantial limitations. In this paper, we propose a crack recognition method based on pyramid features and memory mechanisms that leverages a U-shaped network, long short-term memory mechanisms, and a pyramid feature design to address the recognition accuracy, robustness, and universality issues with deep learning-based crack detection methods in recent years. Experiments were conducted on four publicly available datasets and one private dataset. Compared with the commonly used FCN8s, SegNet, UNet, and DeepLabv3+ models and other related studies using the same evaluation criteria and datasets, our proposed model shows better overall performance in terms of all metrics evaluated

Artificial intelligence in construction asset management: a review of present status, challenges and future opportunities

The built environment is responsible for roughly 40% of global greenhouse emissions, making the sector a crucial factor for climate change and sustainability. Meanwhile, other sectors (like manufacturing) adopted Artificial Intelligence (AI) to solve complex, non-linear problems to reduce waste, inefficiency, and pollution. Therefore, many research efforts in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction community have recently tried introducing AI into building asset management (AM) processes. Since AM encompasses a broad set of disciplines, an overview of several AI applications, current research gaps, and trends is needed. In this context, this study conducted the first state-of-the-art research on AI for building asset management. A total of 578 papers were analyzed with bibliometric tools to identify prominent institutions, topics, and journals. The quantitative analysis helped determine the most researched areas of AM and which AI techniques are applied. The areas were furtherly investigated by reading in-depth the 83 most relevant studies selected by screening the articles’ abstracts identified in the bibliometric analysis. The results reveal many applications for Energy Management, Condition assessment, Risk management, and Project management areas. Finally, the literature review identified three main trends that can be a reference point for future studies made by practitioners or researchers: Digital Twin, Generative Adversarial Networks (with synthetic images) for data augmentation, and Deep Reinforcement Learning