Abstract
Recently, the lack of expansion joint gaps on highway bridges in Korea has been increasing. In particular, with the increase in the number of days during the summer heatwave, the narrowing of the expansion joint gap causes symptoms such as expansion joint damage and pavement blow-up, which threaten traffic safety and structural safety. Therefore, in this study, we developed a machine vision (M/V)-technique-based inspection system that can monitor the expansion joint gap through image analysis while driving at high speed (100 km/h), replacing the current manual method that uses an inspector to inspect the expansion joint gap. To fix the error factors of image analysis that happened during the trial application, a machine learning method was used to improve the accuracy of measuring the gap between the expansion joint device. As a result, the expansion gap identification accuracy was improved by 27.5%, from 67.5% to 95.0%, and the use of the system reduces the survey time by more than 95%, from an average of approximately 1 h/bridge (existing manual inspection method) to approximately 3 min/bridge. We assume, in the future, maintenance practitioners can contribute to preventive maintenance that prepares countermeasures before problems occur.
Highlights
The Korea Expressway Corporation is an institution that builds and maintains expressways in Korea, and the number of highway bridges in use reached about 9800 as of2020
Considering the characteristics of the climate of Korea, which has four distinct seasons, we can see that the importance of maintenance and the role of the bridge expansion joint responding to temperature changes between the cold and hot seasons is growing very high
We developed a survey system equipped with line-scan cameras, Global Positioning System (GPS), and a distance measurement instrument sensor (DMI) in the vehicle, and as a result, we could obtain a safe and accurate image without blocking the road [24,25,26,27,28]
Summary
The Korea Expressway Corporation is an institution that builds and maintains expressways in Korea, and the number of highway bridges in use reached about 9800 as of2020. The number of narrow expansion joint gap occurrences has been increasing. It increased the most in 2018, when the number of days of summer heat waves was the greatest (see Figure 1, Table 1). If such a lack of expansion joint gap occurs, it may adversely affect the structural behavior of the bridge and can be a major threat to traffic safety [1]. The causes of narrow expansion joint gap occurrences vary. There are construction errors, inappropriate pre-setting, deformation of backfill, and alkaline silica reaction; recently, abnormal high temperatures have emerged as one of the causes
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