Ever since ancient times, earthquakes have been a major threat to the civil infrastructures and the safety of human beings. The majority of casualties in earthquake disasters are caused by the damaged civil infrastructures but not by the earthquake itself. Therefore, the efficient and accurate post-earthquake assessment of the conditions of structural damage has been an urgent need for human society. Traditional ways for post-earthquake structural assessment rely heavily on field investigation by experienced experts, yet, it is inevitably subjective and inefficient. Structural response data are also applied to assess the damage; however, it requires mounted sensor networks in advance and it is not intuitional. As many types of damaged states of structures are visible, computer vision-based post-earthquake structural assessment has attracted great attention among the engineers and scholars. With the development of image acquisition sensors, computing resources and deep learning algorithms, deep learning-based post-earthquake structural assessment has gradually shown potential in dealing with image acquisition and processing tasks. This paper comprehensively reviews the state-of-the-art studies of deep learning-based post-earthquake structural assessment in recent years. The conventional way of image processing and machine learning-based structural assessment are presented briefly. The workflow of the methodology for computer vision and deep learning-based post-earthquake structural assessment was introduced. Then, applications of assessment for multiple civil infrastructures are presented in detail. Finally, the challenges of current studies are summarized for reference in future works to improve the efficiency, robustness and accuracy in this field.

Computer vision-based damage detection enables non-contact, efficient and low-cost bridge health monitoring, which reduces the need for labor-intensive manual inspection or that for a large number of on-site sensing instruments. By leveraging recent semantic segmentation approaches, we can detect regions of critical structural components and identify damages at pixel level on images. However, existing methods perform poorly when detecting small and thin damages (e.g., cracks); the problem is exacerbated by imbalanced samples. To this end, we incorporate domain knowledge to introduce a hierarchical semantic segmentation framework that imposes a hierarchical semantic relationship between component categories and damage types. For instance, certain types of concrete cracks are only present on bridge columns, and therefore the noncolumn region may be masked out when detecting such damages. In this way, the damage detection model focuses on extracting features from relevant structural components and avoid those from irrelevant regions. We also utilize multi-scale augmentation to preserve contextual information of each image, without losing the ability to handle small and/or thin damages. In addition, our framework employs an importance sampling, where images with rare components are sampled more often, to address sample imbalance. We evaluated our framework on a public synthetic dataset that consists of 2,000 railway bridges. Our framework achieves a 0.836 mean intersection over union (IoU) for structural component segmentation and a 0.483 mean IoU for damage segmentation. Our results have in total 5% and 18% improvements for the structural component segmentation and damage segmentation tasks, respectively, compared to the best-performing baseline model.

Bridges constantly undergo deterioration and damage, the most common ones being concrete damage and exposed rebar. Periodic inspection of bridges to identify damages can aid in their quick remediation. Likewise, identifying components can provide context for damage assessment and help gauge a bridge's state of interaction with its surroundings. Current inspection techniques rely on manual site visits, which can be time-consuming and costly. More recently, robotic inspection assisted by autonomous data analytics based on Computer Vision (CV) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been viewed as a suitable alternative to manual inspection because of its efficiency and accuracy. To aid research in this avenue, this study performs a comparative assessment of different architectures, loss functions, and ensembling strategies for the autonomous segmentation of bridge components and damages. The experiments lead to several interesting discoveries. Nested Reg-UNet architecture is found to outperform five other state-of-the-art architectures in both damage and component segmentation tasks. The architecture is built by combining a Nested UNet style dense configuration with a pretrained RegNet encoder. In terms of the mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) metric, the Nested Reg-UNet architecture provides an improvement of 2.86% on the damage segmentation task and 1.66% on the component segmentation task compared to the state-of-the-art UNet architecture. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that incorporating the Lovasz-Softmax loss function to counter class imbalance can boost performance by 3.44% in the component segmentation task over the most employed alternative, weighted Cross Entropy (wCE). Finally, weighted softmax ensembling is found to be quite effective when used synchronously with the Nested Reg-UNet architecture by providing mIoU improvement of 0.74% in the component segmentation task and 1.14% in the damage segmentation task over a single-architecture baseline. Overall, the best mIoU of 92.50% for the component segmentation task and 84.19% for the damage segmentation task validate the feasibility of these techniques for autonomous bridge component and damage segmentation using RGB images.

Visual structural inspections are an inseparable part of post-earthquake damage assessments. With unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) establishing a new frontier in visual inspections, there are major computational challenges in processing the collected massive amounts of high-resolution visual data. We propose twin deep learning models that can provide accurate high-resolution structural components and damage segmentation masks efficiently. The traditional approach to cope with high memory computational demands is to either uniformly downsample the raw images at the price of losing fine local details or cropping smaller parts of the images leading to a loss of global contextual information. Therefore, our twin models comprising Trainable Resizing for high-resolution Segmentation Network (TRS-Net) and DmgFormer approaches the global and local semantics from different perspectives. TRS-Net is a compound, high-resolution segmentation architecture equipped with learnable downsampler and upsampler modules to minimize information loss for optimal performance and efficiency. DmgFormer utilizes a transformer backbone and a convolutional decoder head with skip connections on a grid of crops aiming for high precision learning without downsizing. An augmented inference technique is used to boost performance further and reduce the possible loss of context due to grid cropping. Comprehensive experiments have been performed on the 3D physics-based graphics models (PBGMs) synthetic environments in the QuakeCity dataset. The proposed framework is evaluated using several metrics on three segmentation tasks: component type, component damage state, and global damage (crack, rebar, spalling). The models were developed as part of the 2^nd International Competition for Structural Health Monitoring.

The existing vision-based techniques for inspection and condition assessment of civil infrastructure are mostly manual and consequently time-consuming, expensive, subjective, and risky. As a viable alternative, researchers in the past resorted to deep learning-based autonomous damage detection algorithms for expedited post-disaster reconnaissance of structures. Although a number of automatic damage detection algorithms have been proposed, the scarcity of labeled training data remains a major concern. To address this issue, this study proposed a semi-supervised learning (SSL) framework based on consistency regularization and cross-supervision. Image data from post-earthquake reconnaissance, that contains cracks, spalling, and exposed rebars are used to evaluate the proposed solution. Experiments are carried out under different data partition protocols, and it is shown that the proposed SSL method can make use of unlabeled images to enhance the segmentation performance when limited amount of ground truth labels are provided. This study also proposes DeepLab-AASPP and modified versions of U-Net++ based on channel-wise attention mechanism to better segment the components and damage areas from images of reinforced concrete buildings. The channel-wise attention mechanism can effectively improve the performance of the network by dynamically scaling the feature maps so that the networks can focus on more informative feature maps in the concatenation layer. The proposed DeepLab-AASPP achieves the best performance on component segmentation and damage state segmentation tasks with mIoU scores of 0.9850 and 0.7032, respectively. For crack, spalling, and rebar segmentation tasks, modified U-Net++ obtains the best performance with Igou scores (excluding the background pixels) of 0.5449, 0.9375, and 0.5018, respectively. The proposed architectures win the second place in IC-SHM2021 competition in all five tasks of Project 2.

Post-earthquake building condition assessment is crucial for subsequent rescue and remediation and can be automated by emerging computer vision and deep learning technologies. This study is based on an endeavour for the 2nd International Competition of Structural Health Monitoring (IC-SHM 2021). The task package includes five image segmentation objectives - defects (crack/spall/rebar exposure), structural component, and damage state. The structural component and damage state tasks are identified as the priority that can form actionable decisions. A multi-task Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is proposed to conduct the two major tasks simultaneously. The rest 3 sub-tasks (spall/crack/rebar exposure) were incorporated as auxiliary tasks. By synchronously learning defect information (spall/crack/rebar exposure), the multi-task CNN model outperforms the counterpart single-task models in recognizing structural components and estimating damage states. Particularly, the pixel-level damage state estimation witnesses a mIoU (mean intersection over union) improvement from 0.5855 to 0.6374. For the defect detection tasks, rebar exposure is omitted due to the extremely biased sample distribution. The segmentations of crack and spall are automated by single-task U-Net but with extra efforts to resample the provided data. The segmentation of small objects (spall and crack) benefits from the resampling method, with a substantial IoU increment of nearly 10%.

To assess structural condition in a non-destructive manner, computer vision-based structural health monitoring (SHM) has become a focus. Compared to traditional contact-type sensors, the advantages of computer vision-based measurement systems include lower installation costs and broader measurement areas. In this study, we propose a novel computer vision-based vibration measurement and coarse-to-fine damage assessment method for truss bridges. First, a deep learning model FairMOT is introduced to track the regions of interest (ROIs) that include joints to enhance the automation performance compared with traditional target tracking algorithms. To calculate the displacement of the tracked ROIs accurately, a normalized cross-correlation method is adopted to fine-tune the offset, while the Harris corner matching is utilized to correct the vibration displacement errors caused by the non-parallel between the truss plane and the image plane. Then, based on the advantages of the stochastic damage locating vector (SDLV) and Bayesian inference-based stochastic model updating (BI-SMU), they are combined to achieve the coarse-to-fine localization of the truss bridge's damaged elements. Finally, the severity quantification of the damaged components is performed by the BI-SMU. The experiment results show that the proposed method can accurately recognize the vibration displacement and evaluate the structural damage.

Structural integrity can be accessed from dynamic deformations of structures. Moreover, dynamic deformations can be acquired from non-contact sensors such as video cameras. Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi (KLT) algorithm is one of the commonly used methods for motion tracking. However, averaging throughout the extracted features would induce bias in the measurement. In addition, pixel-wise measurements can be converted to physical units through camera intrinsic. Still, the depth information is unreachable without prior knowledge of the space information. The assigned homogeneous coordinates would then mismatch manually selected feature points, resulting in measurement errors during coordinate transformation. In this study, a two-stage optimization method for video-based measurements is proposed. The manually selected feature points are first optimized by minimizing the errors compared with the homogeneous coordinate. Then, the optimized points are utilized for the KLT algorithm to extract displacements through inverse projection. Two additional criteria are employed to eliminate outliers from KLT, resulting in more reliable displacement responses. The second-stage optimization subsequently fine-tunes the geometry of the selected coordinates. The optimization process also considers the number of interpolation points at different depths of an image to reduce the effect of out-of-plane motions. As a result, the proposed method is numerically investigated by using a truss bridge as a physics-based graphic model (PBGM) to extract high-accuracy displacements from recorded videos under various capturing angles and structural conditions.

This paper presents a vibration displacement measurement and damage identification method for a space truss structure from its vibration videos. Features from Accelerated Segment Test (FAST) algorithm is combined with adaptive threshold strategy to detect the feature points of high quality within the Region of Interest (ROI), around each node of the truss structure. Then these points are tracked by Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi (KLT) algorithm along the video frame sequences to obtain the vibration displacement time histories. For some cases with the image plane not parallel to the truss structural plane, the scale factors cannot be applied directly. Therefore, these videos are processed with homography transformation. After scale factor adaptation, tracking results are expressed in physical units and compared with ground truth data. The main operational frequencies and the corresponding mode shapes are identified by using Subspace Stochastic Identification (SSI) from the obtained vibration displacement responses and compared with ground truth data. Structural damages are quantified by elemental stiffness reductions. A Bayesian inference-based objective function is constructed based on natural frequencies to identify the damage by model updating. The Success-History based Adaptive Differential Evolution with Linear Population Size Reduction (L-SHADE) is applied to minimise the objective function by tuning the damage parameter of each element. The locations and severities of damage in each case are then identified. The accuracy and effectiveness are verified by comparison of the identified results with the ground truth data.