Feasibility Study for Vision-Based Cable Force Measurement Using Smartphone

Abstract

An accurate cable force measurement is one of very important practical problems during construction period as well as during service period of cable stayed bridge. In the recent years, with the advances in smartphone technologies, it is possible to rapidly evaluate structural health status and postevent damage using ubiquitous smartphones. In this paper, a novel vision-based cable force measurement method using smartphone camera is proposed for the first time, which enable to estimate cable force by recognizing cable vibration using smartphone camera, and then cable model test is carried out to verify the feasibility of the proposed method. The comparison test between the smartphone application Orion-CC measuring cable force from smartphone built-in accelerometer and the proposed method is conducted on a laboratory scale cable model with different sampling rates. In the proposed method, the vibration responses of cable are obtained by monitoring displacements of a preprinted black circular target attached on the cable model using smartphone camera. The test results showed satisfactory agreements between two methods in both frequency domain and cable force value, demonstrating the feasibility of the proposed cable force measurement method and its advantages such as convenience, ease of operation, and speediness.