Health Monitoring of Civil Structures with Integrated UAV and Image Processing System

This paper describes an innovative protocol for full field mapping of a large civil structures involving effective use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to enable real time structural health monitoring. The proposed frameworks integrates UAVs, image processing and data acquisition procedures for crack detection and assessment of surface degradation. A novel approach is proposed combining hat transform and HSV thresholding technique for crack detection. In addition, grey scale thresholding is employed for the measurement of surface degradations. A Demonstration multi-rotor UAV model is developed to carry out full field inspection of civil structures and real time testing is performed in our large university campus. In order to provide sophisticated monitoring platform for users, a MATLAB Graphical User Interface (GUI) is developed to analyse real time as well as acquired images and the results are validated successfully. The obtained results confirms that, the envisaged approach is the foundation for cost effective and time compressing solution for monitoring of large civil structures. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.