• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.24 no.6
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• pp.709-721
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• 2019

This paper investigates the framework of vision-based dense displacement and strain measurement of miter gates with the approach for the quantitative evaluation of the expected performance. The proposed framework consists of the following steps: (i) Estimation of 3D displacement and strain from images before and after deformation (water-fill event), (ii) evaluation of the expected performance of the measurement, and (iii) selection of measurement setting with the highest expected accuracy. The framework first estimates the full-field optical flow between the images before and after water-fill event, and project the flow to the finite element (FE) model to estimate the 3D displacement and strain. Then, the expected displacement/strain estimation accuracy is evaluated at each node/element of the FE model. Finally, methods and measurement settings with the highest expected accuracy are selected to achieve the best results from the field measurement. A physics-based graphics model (PBGM) of miter gates of the Greenup Lock and Dam with the updated texturing step is used to simulate the vision-based measurements in a photo-realistic environment and evaluate the expected performance of different measurement plans (camera properties, camera placement, post-processing algorithms). The framework investigated in this paper can be used to analyze and optimize the performance of the measurement with different camera placement and post-processing steps prior to the field test.

• 한국방재학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2007.02a
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• pp.49-52
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• 2007

Terrestrial Laser Scanning(TLS) was developed at the mid-to-late 1990s. This technique enables to perform reconnaissance surveying of regions or structures hard to access. Besides, TLS has been extended its application gradually such as preservation of historical remains, underground surveys, slopes, glaciers monitoring and so on. However, though the technique has a lot of advantages, an application for structural health and safety monitoring is a beginning stage and it need much research. Therefore in this study, as a groundwork, the estimation model on stress of structures using TLS and Finite Element Method(FEM) applied by the Digital Elevation Model(DEM) technique of geoinformatics is proposed. For the verification of this model, experiments were performed with a continuous steel beam subjected to point loads and outputs were compared with those of electrical strain sensors.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Building Construction Conference
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• 2021.05a
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• pp.40-41
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• 2021

The construction industry has the highest occupational accidents/injuries among all industries. Korean government installed surveillance camera systems at construction sites to reduce occupational accident rates. Construction safety managers are monitoring potential hazards at the sites through surveillance system; however, the human capability of monitoring surveillance system with their own eyes has critical issues. Therefore, this study proposed to build a deep learning-based safety monitoring system that can obtain information on the recognition, location, identification of workers and heavy equipment in the construction sites by applying multiple-object tracking with instance segmentation. To evaluate the system's performance, we utilized the MS COCO and MOT challenge metrics. These results present that it is optimal for efficiently automating monitoring surveillance system task at construction sites.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.31 no.5
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• pp.457-468
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• 2023

Buildings, bridges, and dams are examples of civil infrastructure that play an important role in public life. These structures are prone to structural variations over time as a result of external forces that might disrupt the operation of the structures, cause structural integrity issues, and raise safety concerns for the occupants. Therefore, monitoring the state of a structure, also known as structural health monitoring (SHM), is essential. Owing to the emergence of the fourth industrial revolution, next-generation sensors, such as wireless sensors, UAVs, and video cameras, have recently been utilized to improve the quality and efficiency of building forensics. This study presents a method that uses a target-based system to estimate the dynamic displacement and its corresponding dynamic properties of structures using UAV-based video. A laboratory experiment was performed to verify the tracking technique using a shaking table to excite an SDOF specimen and comparing the results between a laser distance sensor, accelerometer, and fixed camera. Then a field test was conducted to validate the proposed framework. One target marker is placed on the specimen, and another marker is attached to the ground, which serves as a stationary reference to account for the undesired UAV movement. The results from the UAV and stationary camera displayed a root mean square (RMS) error of 2.02% for the displacement, and after post-processing the displacement data using an OMA method, the identified natural frequency and damping ratio showed significant accuracy and similarities. The findings illustrate the capabilities and reliabilities of the methodology using UAV to evaluate the dynamic properties of structures.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.24 no.5
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• pp.649-657
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• 2019

Recently, an advanced video deflectometer based on the principle of off-axis digital image correlation was presented and advocated for remote and real-time deflection monitoring of large engineering structures. In engineering practice, measurement accuracy is one of the most important technical indicators of the video deflectometer. However, it has been observed in many outdoor experiments that data drift often presents in the measured deflection-time curves, which is caused by the instability of imaging system and the unavoidable influences of ambient interferences (e.g., ambient light changes, ambient temperature variations as well as ambient vibrations) in non-laboratory conditions. The non-ideal unstable imaging conditions seriously deteriorate the measurement accuracy of the video deflectometer. In this work, to perform high-accuracy deflection monitoring, potential sources for the drift error are analyzed, and a drift error model is established by considering these error sources. Based on this model, a simple, easy-to-implement yet effective reference point compensation method is proposed for real-time removal of the drift error in measured deflections. The practicality and effectiveness of the proposed method are demonstrated by in-situ deflection monitoring of railway and highway bridges.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.325-334
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• 2023

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.

• International Journal of Control, Automation, and Systems
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.51-60
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• 2007

This paper describes a visual tracking control law of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(UAV) for monitoring of structures and maintenance of bridges. It presents a control law based on computer vision for quasi-stationary flights above a planar target. The first part of the UAV's mission is the navigation from an initial position to a final position to define a desired trajectory in an unknown 3D environment. The proposed method uses the homography matrix computed from the visual information and derives, using backstepping techniques, an adaptive nonlinear tracking control law allowing the effective tracking and depth estimation. The depth represents the desired distance separating the camera from the target.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.250-256
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• 2015

We present a novel method to model the body posture of a worm for vision-based automatic monitoring and analysis. The worm considered in this study is a Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans), which is popularly used for research in biological science and engineering. We model the posture by an open chain of a few curved or rigid line segments, in contrast to previously published approaches wherein a large number of small rigid elements are connected for the modeling. Each link segment is represented by only two parameters: an arc angle and an arc length for a curved segment, or an orientation angle and a link length for a straight line segment. Links in the proposed method can be readily related using the Denavit-Hartenberg convention due to similarities to the kinematics of an articulated manipulator. Our method was tested with real worm images, and accurate results were obtained.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2004.05b
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• pp.587-590
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• 2004

In this paper proposed a HMM(Hidden Martov Model)-based segmentation method which is able to model shadows as well as foreground and background regions. Shadow of moving objects often obstruct visual tracking. We propose an HMM-based segmentation method which classifies in real time oath objects. In the case of traffic monitoring movies, the effectiveness of the proposed method has been proven through experimental results

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.359-371
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• 2019

As part of a structural health monitoring system, the relative geometric relationship between a ship and bridge has been recognized as important for bridge authorities and ship owners to avoid ship-bridge collision. This study proposes a novel computer vision method for the real-time geometric parameter identification of moving ships based on a single shot multibox detector (SSD) by using transfer learning techniques and monocular vision. The identification framework consists of ship detection (coarse scale) and geometric parameter calculation (fine scale) modules. For the ship detection, the SSD, which is a deep learning algorithm, was employed and fine-tuned by ship image samples downloaded from the Internet to obtain the rectangle regions of interest in the coarse scale. Subsequently, for the geometric parameter calculation, an accurate ship contour is created using morphological operations within the saturation channel in hue, saturation, and value color space. Furthermore, a local coordinate system was constructed using projective geometry transformation to calculate the geometric parameters of ships, such as width, length, height, localization, and velocity. The application of the proposed method to in situ video images, obtained from cameras set on the girder of the Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge above the shipping channel, confirmed the efficiency, accuracy, and effectiveness of the proposed method.