Automated extraction of structural elements in steel girder bridges from laser point clouds

This study proposes a heuristic-based method to automate the semantic segmentation of laser point clouds collected from steel girder bridges and thus to facilitate the applications of laser scanning in bridge inspection and management. In the proposed method, domain knowledge on the geometric and to...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inAutomation in construction Vol. 125; p. 103582
Main Authors Yan, Yujie, Hajjar, Jerome F.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 01.05.2021
Elsevier BV
Subjects
Accuracy
Automation
Bridge abutments
Bridge decks
Bridge inspection
Girder bridges
Girders
Heuristic methods
Image segmentation
Laser applications
Laser point clouds
Lasers
Piers
Scanners
Scanning
Semantic segmentation
Steel bridges
Steel frames
Steel-girder bridge
Structural members
Terrestrial laser scanner
UAV-based laser scanner
Laser point clouds
UAV-based laser scanner
Steel-girder bridge
Semantic segmentation
Terrestrial laser scanner
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Summary:This study proposes a heuristic-based method to automate the semantic segmentation of laser point clouds collected from steel girder bridges and thus to facilitate the applications of laser scanning in bridge inspection and management. In the proposed method, domain knowledge on the geometric and topological constraints of steel girder bridges are utilized to recognize and extract individual instances of the main structural elements, which include the bridge deck, steel girders, cross-frames, piers and abutments. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated using point clouds acquired by a terrestrial laser scanner and a UAV-based laser scanner. The results demonstrate that the proposed method on average can achieve a 98.3% element-level accuracy and a 96.1% point-level accuracy on terrestrial laser scanning data. For UAV-based laser scanning data, the average accuracy is reduced slightly to 96.0% in element-level and 93.3% in point-level. •Automated extraction of steel girder bridge structural elements from point clouds•Structural elements include steel girders, bridge deck, cross-frames, substructures•Object detection algorithms validated against terrestrial and UAV-based laser scanning data
ISSN:0926-5805
1872-7891
DOI:10.1016/j.autcon.2021.103582