BOX-AND-ELLIPSE-BASED NEURO-FUZZY APPROACH FOR BRIDGE COATING ASSESSMENT

Image processing has been utilized for assessment of infrastructure surface coating conditions for years. However, there is no robust method to overcome the non-uniform illumination problem to date. Therefore, this paper aims to deal with non-uniform illumination problems for bridge coating assessment and to achieve automated rust intensity recognition. This paper starts with selection of the best color configuration for non-uniformly illuminated rust image segmentation. The adaptive-network-based fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) is adopted as the framework to develop the new model, the box-and-ellipse-based neuro-fuzzy approach (BENFA). Finally, the performance of BENFA is compared to the Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) method, which is often used in image recognition, to show the advantage and robustness of BENFA.