Full-field displacement measurement of long-span bridges using one camera and robust self-adaptive complex pyramid

Abstract

Full-field motion with a high spatial resolution can reflect the health state of long-span bridges. Traditional structural health monitoring (SHM) systems measure the structural displacement at sparse points only. Despite the development of various methods for obtaining high-resolution responses, they fail to estimate the multi-scale motions of real long-span bridges. A novel full-field motion estimation method is proposed to directly measure the entire structural responses using one digital camera. In this approach, multi-scale motions of different components under unknown excitations are encoded in a complex pyramid. The parameters of the complex pyramid are determined by the localization index to record robust local phases at each measurement point. Two indices, namely, the spatial Laplacian of the phase and the amplitude value degradation index, are designed to adaptively estimate multi-scale displacements contained in the complex pyramid. The proposed method estimates the full-field displacements of a steel frame accurately in an experimental test. Moreover, the full-field displacement of the 1377-m long main span Tsing Ma Bridge is estimated using only one shot. Results suggest that the displacement estimated by the proposed method matches well with the GPS data and further visualizes the bridge mode shapes with a high resolution.