A HOLISTIC APPROACH FOR INSPECTION OF CIVIL INFRASTRUCTURES BASED ON COMPUTER VISION TECHNIQUES

Abstract. In this work, it is examined the 2D recognition and 3D modelling of concrete tunnel cracks, through visual cues. At the time being, the structural integrity inspection of large-scale infrastructures is mainly performed through visual observations by human inspectors, who identify structural defects, rate them and, then, categorize their severity. The described approach targets at minimum human intervention, for autonomous inspection of civil infrastructures. The shortfalls of existing approaches in crack assessment are being addressed by proposing a novel detection scheme. Although efforts have been made in the field, synergies among proposed techniques are still missing. The holistic approach of this paper exploits the state of the art techniques of pattern recognition and stereo-matching, in order to build accurate 3D crack models. The innovation lies in the hybrid approach for the CNN detector initialization, and the use of the modified census transformation for stereo matching along with a binary fusion of two state-of-the-art optimization schemes. The described approach manages to deal with images of harsh radiometry, along with severe radiometric differences in the stereo pair. The effectiveness of this workflow is evaluated on a real dataset gathered in highway and railway tunnels. What is promising is that the computer vision workflow described in this work can be transferred, with adaptations of course, to other infrastructure such as pipelines, bridges and large industrial facilities that are in the need of continuous state assessment during their operational life cycle.