Exploring Technological Alternatives to the Visual Inspection Method in the Built Environment

Abstract

Buildings show symptoms and suffer injuries or failures that demand efficient approaches and sustainable solutions in order to maintain or improve their condition. In previous studies, the authors of this paper proposed a network methodology which stores and analyzes information on the degradation of the built environment in different cities, based on a visual inspection methodology for data collection. The demand for accurate information analysis of facades, along with the inspection time for each facade, creates a need for new information collecting techniques. Therefore, this article aims to evaluate technological equipment incorporated in the traditional inspection methods that can work as a complement to achieve better and more advanced results. For this, an experiment was carried out in the city of Brno, Czech Republic, where five building facades in the city center were analyzed in order to qualify and validate a mobile georeferenced scanner, static georeferenced scanner and thermographic camera equipment for potential incorporation into the current inspection method. Quantitative and qualitative analyses are included, together with some of the capabilities and potential uses of these technological resources for an improvement in the network methodology.