An integrated visual-inertial technique for structural displacement and velocity measurement

Measuring displacement response for civil structures is very important for assessing their performance, safety and integrity. Recently, video-based techniques that utilize low-cost high-resolution digital cameras have been developed for such an application. These techniques however have relatively low sampling frequency and the results are usually contaminated with noises. In this study, an integrated visual-inertial measurement method that combines a monocular videogrammetric displacement measurement technique and a collocated accelerometer is proposed for displacement and velocity measurement of civil engineering structures. The monocular videogrammetric technique extracts three-dimensional translation and rotation of a planar target from an image sequence recorded by one camera. The obtained displacement is then fused with acceleration measured from a collocated accelerometer using a multi-rate Kalman filter with smoothing technique. This data fusion not only can improve the accuracy and the frequency bandwidth of displacement measurement but also provide estimate for velocity. The proposed measurement technique is illustrated by a shake table test and a pedestrian bridge test. Results show that the fusion of displacement and acceleration can mitigate their respective limitations and produce more accurate displacement and velocity responses with a broader frequency bandwidth.