Environmental effect on vision-based structural dynamic displacement monitoring

Abstract

Structural dynamic displacement is an important indicator of the health condition of long-span bridges. Monitoring of bridge dynamic displacement has been a critical task within the context of structural health monitoring (SHM). Traditionally, the structural displacement measurement methods are contact, wired and time-consuming. With the great progress of image processing technique and vision robot science, the visionbased monitoring systems have been developed rapidly and received a huge amount of attentions in the field of SHM. However, in the practical applications, the environmental factors will affect the operational performance of the vision-based system. In this study, a series of comparative experiments are conducted to explore the robustness of vision-based structural dynamic displacement monitoring under varying illumination conditions by use of various types of vision targets (quick response (QR) code and LED lamp). The experimental results indicate that the robustness of the vision-based system is weakened under poor illumination conditions when the QR code is used to be the vision target in comparison with the vision target of LED lamp.