Remote Inspection of Railway Bridges Using UAVs and Computer Vision

Reliable inspections of concrete railway bridges play a significant role during their service life to evaluate their health and as part of proactive maintenance where future deterioration is anticipated. Similar to most concrete structures, they are exposed to various types of degradation or distress as a result of design or construction errors, accidental loadings, or environmental effects. Identifying any signs of distress through periodic inspections is of paramount importance for critical infrastructure such as railway bridges. Visual inspection is one of the most common method to check the status of the structures. However, the sheer size of such structures possesses significant challenges to the inspectors. This is a common problem for many large structures such as bridges, dams, cooling towers, etc., where investigating the whole area would be time-consuming and potentially unsafe. Therefore, there is a strong need for new inspection techniques that reduce disruption and improve the efficiency and reliability of the acquired data. The use of emerging technologies in civil engineering is increasing rapidly. This is particularly true for optical methods—advanced alternatives to visual inspection in which objects are imaged using high precision, high sensitivity cameras. The current chapter gives an overview related to state-of-the-art in automatic damage detection based on image processing techniques.