Rapid Geometric Evaluation of Transportation Infrastructure Based on a Proposed Low-Cost Portable Mobile Laser Scanning System.

Efficient geometric evaluation of roads and tunnels is crucial to traffic management, especially in post-disaster situations. This paper reports on a study of the geometric feature detection method based on multi-sensor mobile laser scanning (MLS) system data. A portable, low-cost system that can be mounted on vehicles and utilizes integrated laser scanning devices was developed. Coordinate systems and timestamps from numerous devices were merged to create 3D point clouds of objects being measured. Feature points reflecting the geometric information of measuring objects were retrieved based on changes in the point cloud's shape, which contributed to measuring the road width, vertical clearance, and tunnel cross section. Self-developed software was used to conduct the measuring procedure, and a real-time online visualized platform was designed to reconstruct 3D models of the measured objects, forming a 3D digital map carrying the obtained geometric information. Finally, a case study was carried out. The measurement results of several representative nodes are discussed here, verifying the robustness of the proposed system. In addition, the main sources of interference are also discussed.

A Novel Method for Heat Haze-Induced Error Mitigation in Vision-Based Bridge Displacement Measurement.

Vision-based techniques have become widely applied in structural displacement monitoring. However, heat haze poses a great threat to the precision of vision systems by creating distortions in the images. This paper proposes a vision-based bridge displacement measurement technique with heat haze mitigation capability. The properties of heat haze-induced errors are illustrated. A dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DT-CWT) is used to mitigate the heat haze in images, and the speeded-up robust features (SURF) algorithm is employed to extract the displacement. The proposed method is validated through indoor experiments on a bridge model. The designed vision system achieves high measurement accuracy in a heat haze-free condition. The proposed mitigation method successfully corrects 61.05% of heat haze-induced errors in static experiments and 95.31% in dynamic experiments.

Fatigue Reliability Assessment for Orthotropic Steel Decks Based on Long-Term Strain Monitoring.

A time-dependent fatigue reliability assessment approach is proposed for welded details of orthotropic steel decks (OSDs) using long-term strain monitoring data. The fatigue reliability limit function of the welded details is established based on the Eurocode specifications. Depending on the distribution characteristics of the measured daily equivalent stress range, either the lognormal distribution or Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is selected to quantify its uncertainty. Subsequently, the fatigue reliability can be calculated using either an explicit formula or the Monte Carlo method. This proposed approach is applied for the fatigue reliability evaluation of two rib-to-deck and two rib-to-rib welded fatigue details of an in-service suspension bridge. The results show that the reliability indices decrease significantly with bridge's service life. Except for a rib-to-deck detail, all other three welded details cannot meet the target fatigue reliability during this bridge's 100-year service life. The proposed approach can help bridge owners and operators make informed decisions regarding maintenance and repair of potential fatigue cracks.

A Vision-Based Sensor for Noncontact Structural Displacement Measurement.

Conventional displacement sensors have limitations in practical applications. This paper develops a vision sensor system for remote measurement of structural displacements. An advanced template matching algorithm, referred to as the upsampled cross correlation, is adopted and further developed into a software package for real-time displacement extraction from video images. By simply adjusting the upsampling factor, better subpixel resolution can be easily achieved to improve the measurement accuracy. The performance of the vision sensor is first evaluated through a laboratory shaking table test of a frame structure, in which the displacements at all the floors are measured by using one camera to track either high-contrast artificial targets or low-contrast natural targets on the structural surface such as bolts and nuts. Satisfactory agreements are observed between the displacements measured by the single camera and those measured by high-performance laser displacement sensors. Then field tests are carried out on a railway bridge and a pedestrian bridge, through which the accuracy of the vision sensor in both time and frequency domains is further confirmed in realistic field environments. Significant advantages of the noncontact vision sensor include its low cost, ease of operation, and flexibility to extract structural displacement at any point from a single measurement.

Citizen Sensors for SHM: Towards a Crowdsourcing Platform.

This paper presents an innovative structural health monitoring (SHM) platform in terms of how it integrates smartphone sensors, the web, and crowdsourcing. The ubiquity of smartphones has provided an opportunity to create low-cost sensor networks for SHM. Crowdsourcing has given rise to citizen initiatives becoming a vast source of inexpensive, valuable but heterogeneous data. Previously, the authors have investigated the reliability of smartphone accelerometers for vibration-based SHM. This paper takes a step further to integrate mobile sensing and web-based computing for a prospective crowdsourcing-based SHM platform. An iOS application was developed to enable citizens to measure structural vibration and upload the data to a server with smartphones. A web-based platform was developed to collect and process the data automatically and store the processed data, such as modal properties of the structure, for long-term SHM purposes. Finally, the integrated mobile and web-based platforms were tested to collect the low-amplitude ambient vibration data of a bridge structure. Possible sources of uncertainties related to citizens were investigated, including the phone location, coupling conditions, and sampling duration. The field test results showed that the vibration data acquired by smartphones operated by citizens without expertise are useful for identifying structural modal properties with high accuracy. This platform can be further developed into an automated, smart, sustainable, cost-free system for long-term monitoring of structural integrity of spatially distributed urban infrastructure. Citizen Sensors for SHM will be a novel participatory sensing platform in the way that it offers hybrid solutions to transitional crowdsourcing parameters.