Built Infrastructure Monitoring and Inspection Using UAVs and Vision-based Algorithms

TL;DR

This paper introduces a UAV-based inspection system utilizing vision algorithms to detect structural damages like cracks in real-time, demonstrating its effectiveness on a light rail base structure.

Contribution

The study develops a real-time UAV inspection system with a novel image processing method for crack detection using intensity histograms.

Findings

Effective crack detection demonstrated through experiments

Real-time data transfer and processing validated

System applicable to structural inspection tasks

Abstract

This study presents an inspecting system using real-time control unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to investigate structural surfaces. The system operates under favourable weather conditions to inspect a target structure, which is the Wentworth light rail base structure in this study. The system includes a drone, a GoPro HERO4 camera, a controller and a mobile phone. The drone takes off the ground manually in the testing field to collect the data requiring for later analysis. The images are taken through HERO 4 camera and then transferred in real time to the remote processing unit such as a ground control station by the wireless connection established by a Wi-Fi router. An image processing method has been proposed to detect defects or damages such as cracks. The method based on intensity histogram algorithms to exploit the pixel group related to the crack contained in the low intensity interval. Experiments, simulation and comparisons have been conducted to evaluate the performance and validity of the proposed system.