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CE518 Graduate Student Conference, 2018

Survey of Image and Video Processing Applications

in Civil Engineering

Kadyrbek ISMAILOV,1 Zafer ALTINSOY, 2

Muzaffer DOĞANAY3 and Beyza BILGIN4

1
Middle East Technical University, Department of Civil Engineering, Turkey, e-mail:
kadyrbek.ismailov@metu.edu.tr
2
Middle East Technical University, Department of Civil Engineering, Turkey, email:
zafer.altinsoy@metu.edu.tr
3
Middle East Technical University, Department of Civil Engineering, Turkey, email:
muzaffer.doganay@metu.edu.tr
4
Karadeniz Technical University, Department of Geomatics Engineering, Turkey, email:
beyza.bilgin@citysurf.com.tr

ABSTRACT

Civil engineering is -if not the oldest- one of the oldest engineering practices. Over the eons both
design and implementation parts of it improved with the growing human knowledge. Image and
video processing is one of the promising methods of modern times and this paper’s aim is to
increase the usage of it by raising awareness, since they can make constructions better, safer and
easier. So, this paper summarizes the major advance on the application of these techniques on civil
engineering through a literature survey. Applications are divided based on the similarities of the
algorithm in three groups which are deflection, area & dimension and flow detection methods. For
each group applications have been described in details.

INTRODUCTION

Image processing is a method to analyze and manipulate a digital image to get some useful
information from it. Which widely used in different engineering disciplines like electrical
electronical engineering, mechanical and for our case, civil engineering. It is not one specific
method but it is a combination of different techniques and algorithms for unique problems. Even
though it is not a new concept, it is still a rapidly developing area. It has advantages like cost, time
and labor efficiency.
Measuring dimensions of components are important for stability in civil engineering. In
ancient times, people used ropes, sticks and similar things for measuring dimensions. As time
passed the instruments also developed to ruler, laser meter, strain gauge and other modern tools.
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Nowadays, we can get rid of these instruments by using image processing which is more cost and
labor friendly than physical tools.
Aim of this paper is to make reader familiar with this technique and encourage them to use
these applications by summarizing the most common and inspiring image processing applications
in civil engineering from relevant journals and conference papers.

DEFLECTION DETECTION

Image processing can be very useful when it comes to deflection measurement. By saying
deflection measurement, we mean crack, strain and vibration measurements.
Cracking in civil engineering has significant impact on safety and serviceability of the
structure. Determination and classification of cracks in early stages can helpful in reducing
maintenance cost and increasing structure lifetime. Recent study on crack detection carried by Yu,
Zhu and Chen (2017) is based on image processing. They divided process to 3 parts. First, they
put the image in the frequency domain. Then an “anisotropy of each pixel is computed in an image
subblock” by using optimum threshold. The last part is connection of crack lines in each subregion.
The final crack line is given in the Figure.1.

a. b.

Figure. 1. Crack Detection: (a) original image; (b) result of the proposed method

Moreover, image processing can be used in strain measurements of an object too. Instead
of traditional methods which is based on implication of strain gauges and linear variable
displacement transducers (LVDTs), offered non-contact method can accurately measure strain by
using only camera and software program (Verma, Aggarwal and Srivastava 2013). In this method
every pixel is working as sensor and by taking difference of two pictures, deformed and
undeformed, one can measure the strain. If the strain is smaller than pixel size then sub-pixel
algorithms can be used to interpolate and determine the strain (Hild and Roux 2006).
In addition to crack and strain, vibration is also can be measured by using this method with
only use of a simple smartphone and computer vision algorithm instead of expensive laser
vibrometers which are used currently in the fields as a non-contact instrument. One of the methods
of identifying vibration characteristics is tracking subpixel movements of the object which is called
as region of interest (ROI) method. Another one is multi-scale image processing method which
extracts the local pixel phases and by using spatiotemporal filter gets local vibrations.
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In the study of Orak and Ozturk (2018), they used smartphone and vision-based algorithm
to identify first natural frequency mode of the steel cantilever and verified the result with
accelerometer readings and analytical calculations. The results of the experiment are in Table 1.

Table 1. Identification of 1st mode frequency of the steel cantilever with different methods
Method 1st mode Frequency
Accelerometer readings 4.95 Hz
Analytical calculation 4.90 Hz
Image processing 4.70 Hz

As you can see the results are close to each other and this verifies that the image processing
can be used in vibration analyses.

AREA AND DIMENSION DETECTION

Another use of image processing is detecting areas and dimensions. By analyzing color changes
that caused by material or health differences in the image, one can calculate many parameters.
While possibilities of usage and aim is many, one of the most common and inspiring
application is assessment of deterioration in materials (Wu et al. 2016). Identifying the deformed
or deteriorated surfaces using image processing can be an easy and cheap structural health
monitoring method when it’s automated. Many reliable image processing methods had been
developed over time and all methods aimed to simplify the pixels of images and filter the useless
environment in order to have only distinguishable material areas in the image. Figure 2 (Pragalath
et al. 2018) shows the differences between regular and processed images.

(a) (b)
Figure 2. Test images: (a) processed test images: (b).

There are many methods like Bottom Hat Transform Method that filters the environment
pixels from images and methods like Skeletonization which converts the detected edges into a
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single pixel-wide line. After proper method carried out, the damage area of the surface that
degraded and spalled can be calculated in proportion to the pixels of affected area also the crack
length can be obtained too. If there are N detected pixels where the distance between any pixels
corresponds to x cm, then the overall N pixels corresponds to (N-1)*x cm.
This approach can be adapted to many problems from evaluation of pavement wear
(Amarasiri et al. 2012) to evaluation of concrete pavers texture (de Oliveira and Prudêncio 2015)
since ensuring adequate skid-resistance on all pavements is a major task in pavement management
and the most important requirements for concrete pavers is surface texture. The same approach for
measuring crack length can be used to measure highway horizontal parameters from satellite
images (Cheng and Shi 2011) in producing maps.
Another common use of image processing is segregation of different materials using their
unique color. When it is required to have information about heterogeneity of material mixtures,
image processing can be used if only materials has different colors. A segregation coefficient Cs
can be found from images.
𝑊1 − 𝑊0
C𝑠 = × 100%
𝑊1 − 𝑊0
In this equation W1 is volumetric proportion of material A in the inner core, while W0 is
volumetric proportion of material A in the outer ring. Figure 3 shows an example of this application
type on a rubber-sand mixture (Wang et al. 2019).

(a) (b) (c)

Figure 3. Rubber-sand mixture: (a) outer ring: (b) inner core: (c).

This approach can be implemented on various problems like investigating fire damages
(Lin et al. 2004), characterizing saturated sand specimens (Kim et al. 2014) and identification of
materials (Brilakis and Soibelman 2005). If this approach performed on structures as
simultaneously and automatically, it becomes a good structural health sensor for detection of
corrosion damage (Soligon et al. 2017) and rust defects of paintings (Lee and Chang 2005).
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Dimensions can be found by image processing as well as areas. After conducting

dimensional analysis, a components unknown dimensions can be found by known dimensions
(González-Aguilera and Gómez-Lahoz 2009).

FLOW DETECTION

While civil engineering mostly focused on more static structures such as buildings and bridges it
is not the only area of the civil engineering, dynamic structures such as vehicle transportation and
river flows are also part of it. Image and video processing methods are great tools to understand
the behavior of these constantly changing structures. In this chapter application of image and video
processing on transporting and hydraulic engineering will be explained.
Measuring the velocity of water (and other viscose materials) was always a challenge for the
humanity. One can easily measure the speed of a boy who is running from one side of the bridge
to another side of it, with only help of a watch. But this watch would not be enough to measure the
water flow rate running under the bridge. Because, while child is one solid entity with well-defined
borders, water body is continuous flow which runs through upstream point to downstream of the
river. One cannot choose a specific water particle with naked eye and watch its speed. A primitive
method to solve this issue is putting a small, light, wide thing like a leaf on the river and watch its
speed. Since the days of leaves, technology has developed and now, we have Particle Image
Velocimetry method.
Particle Image Velocimetry method is first introduced in 1984 (Adrian 1984) and it is defined
as “accurate, quantitative measurement of fluid velocity vectors at a very large number of points
simultaneously” by Adrian (Adrian 2005). To do that, small trackable particles are added in the
target flow (Westerweel 1997) and electronic cameras are used to record images. Then these
images processed with the computer programs to understand fluid behavior of the laminar and
turbulent flows. Measured length scale can go as low as 10−7 m which is called micro-PIV (μPIV)
(Wereley and Meinhart 2010). And it can cover the surfaces at least up to 45000 m2 which is
(unsurprisingly) called Large Scale PIV and it is described as cost-efficient reliable technique
(Fujita et al. 1998).
Image & Video Processing tools are being used actively in transportation engineering field to
observe the quantity, type and velocity of the passing vehicles on the roads. With the help of this
information engineer and city planners can developed better models and predictions for the future.
Different techniques have been developed and many commercially available, easy to use tools are
in the market for this purpose. Regarding the effect of weather conditions on the accuracy of the
method an evaluation of one of the popular tool has been done and it is concluded that bad weather
conditions like rain is not cause any problem on the result, however in the nighttime accuracy of
the system dropped (Oh and Leonard 2003). This kind of result show us that while it is a helpful
technique, it is not 100% reliable and still open to development.
An example potential development is using of aerial cameras rather than on the ground
cameras. On the ground, one camera is only assigned to one specific road however on the air, much
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wider area can be watched. On a 2017 study, researchers used aerial cameras to observe vehicle
flow on 64.80 m2 area (Zhao et al. 2017) which is significantly larger than any on the ground
camera can observe. And they achieved more than 90% accuracy in the speed, density and volume
estimates.

CONCLUSION

Survey of image and video processing related articles have been conducted and based on this
survey different applications of this method on civil engineering described in three groups. In
deflection group crack, strain and vibration detection; in area & dimension group material
segmentation and material defect detection; in flow group vehicle and fluid characteristics
detection explained. We hope that this paper gives some insight about image and video processing
applications in civil engineering to reader and encourage them to use these methods.
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REFERENCES

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