Combination of image-based documentation and augmented reality for structural health monitoring and building pathology

Abstract

With the current deterioration rate of existing infrastructure, the importance of intervention and preservation efforts such as on-site visual inspections, non-destructive evaluation, structural health monitoring (SHM), and building pathology are on the rise. A critical aspect of these intervention and preservation methods is the visualization and accessibility of large, heterogeneous data sets. To enable diverse stakeholders to make informed choices, data and metadata for the built environment needs to be directly integrated into a user's viewing environment. To address this challenge, a human-machine interface which organizes these types of data and provides actionable information is necessary. The main aim of this work is to develop a preliminary framework for documenting and visualizing data about the built environment both on and off site using a combination of image-based documentation and augmented reality (AR). While this work illustrates preliminary annotation mechanisms such as drawing, the concept of projecting data between the image-based environment and the AR environment is the main contribution of this work. This method was applied to test objects as well as case studies in SHM and building pathology.