Monitoring crack changes in concrete structures

Abstract

This study proposes a crack-monitoring system to quantify the change of cracks from multitemporal images during the monitoring period. A series of images were taken from an off-the-shelf digital camera. Concrete cracks were extracted from the digital images by employing a series of image-processing techniques. The image coordinates and orientation of same cracks can be changed since the position and direction of the portable camera vary at every exposure time. To monitor the crack changes (width and length), it is critical to transform the image coordinates of cracks extracted from each image into the same object coordinates of the concrete surface. In this study, such a geometric relationship was automatically recovered using the two-dimensional (2D) projective transformation based on the modified iterated Hough transform (MIHT) algorithm, the result of which solved the transformation parameters. To improve the computational operation of MIHT, regions of parameter estimation were also investigated. The developed algorithms were applied to monitor the crack of the concrete specimen. As a result, the change of cracks on the concrete specimen was successfully detected and accurately quantified. © 2005 Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering.