Automation and Computational Intelligence for Road Maintenance and Management

5Automatic Detection and Its Applications in Infrastructure

5.1 Introduction

In infrastructure maintenance and management, the most important task and mission of the network manager and engineers are to maintain and improve the efficiency of infrastructure structures, such as roads, bridges, technical buildings, and structures. Before starting any treatment, the distress and its initial extent must be determined. Infrastructure distress occurs due to various causes, including aging, overload, repeated loading and fatigue of materials, poor performance, weather conditions and extreme heat or cold, and frequency of temperature changes, or a combination of all these factors. Visual defects are signs of an abnormality in the infrastructure, and clinical signs can lead to practical and effective solutions. Since it is not possible to visually inspect all infrastructures accurately and quickly, human errors are the main cause of evaluation errors, and therefore, automatic systems are used for detection. In this chapter, the basic principles and working methods of diagnosis and new effective parameters in diagnosing failure or anomaly are presented.

Various hypotheses and ideas with different structures have been presented in recent decades for processing, evaluating, and diagnosing based on the principles of image processing, which has resulted in diagnoses of acceptable speed and accuracy. Accurate and fast performance of the diagnostic step optimizes the next steps, including classification ...