• International conference on construction engineering and project management
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• 2020.12a
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• pp.129-136
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• 2020

Augmented reality (AR) technology assists construction workers by superimposing additional virtual information onto their real worksite environments. Ideally, this provides them with a better understanding of their tasks and hence boosts task performance. However, the additional information that AR places in users' field of view could limit their ability to understand what is going on in their surroundings and to predict how conditions may change in the near future. AR-assisted systems on construction sites could therefore expose their users to safety risks due to disturbance from the system. Hence, it is important to understand how AR-assisted systems can block users' understanding of their immediate environments, and in turn, how worksite safety in the construction industry could be improved through better design of such systems. This preliminary research conducted a laboratory experiment that simulated rebar inspection tasks and compared the situational awareness of AR users against that of subjects using traditional paper-based inspection methods, as measured by the Situation Awareness Rating Technique. Based on the results, we discuss the safety impact of head-mounted AR-assisted displays on situational awareness during construction tasks.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.365-381
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• 2023

The existing vision-based techniques for inspection and condition assessment of civil infrastructure are mostly manual and consequently time-consuming, expensive, subjective, and risky. As a viable alternative, researchers in the past resorted to deep learning-based autonomous damage detection algorithms for expedited post-disaster reconnaissance of structures. Although a number of automatic damage detection algorithms have been proposed, the scarcity of labeled training data remains a major concern. To address this issue, this study proposed a semi-supervised learning (SSL) framework based on consistency regularization and cross-supervision. Image data from post-earthquake reconnaissance, that contains cracks, spalling, and exposed rebars are used to evaluate the proposed solution. Experiments are carried out under different data partition protocols, and it is shown that the proposed SSL method can make use of unlabeled images to enhance the segmentation performance when limited amount of ground truth labels are provided. This study also proposes DeepLab-AASPP and modified versions of U-Net++ based on channel-wise attention mechanism to better segment the components and damage areas from images of reinforced concrete buildings. The channel-wise attention mechanism can effectively improve the performance of the network by dynamically scaling the feature maps so that the networks can focus on more informative feature maps in the concatenation layer. The proposed DeepLab-AASPP achieves the best performance on component segmentation and damage state segmentation tasks with mIoU scores of 0.9850 and 0.7032, respectively. For crack, spalling, and rebar segmentation tasks, modified U-Net++ obtains the best performance with Igou scores (excluding the background pixels) of 0.5449, 0.9375, and 0.5018, respectively. The proposed architectures win the second place in IC-SHM2021 competition in all five tasks of Project 2.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.335-349
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• 2023

Bridges constantly undergo deterioration and damage, the most common ones being concrete damage and exposed rebar. Periodic inspection of bridges to identify damages can aid in their quick remediation. Likewise, identifying components can provide context for damage assessment and help gauge a bridge's state of interaction with its surroundings. Current inspection techniques rely on manual site visits, which can be time-consuming and costly. More recently, robotic inspection assisted by autonomous data analytics based on Computer Vision (CV) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been viewed as a suitable alternative to manual inspection because of its efficiency and accuracy. To aid research in this avenue, this study performs a comparative assessment of different architectures, loss functions, and ensembling strategies for the autonomous segmentation of bridge components and damages. The experiments lead to several interesting discoveries. Nested Reg-UNet architecture is found to outperform five other state-of-the-art architectures in both damage and component segmentation tasks. The architecture is built by combining a Nested UNet style dense configuration with a pretrained RegNet encoder. In terms of the mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) metric, the Nested Reg-UNet architecture provides an improvement of 2.86% on the damage segmentation task and 1.66% on the component segmentation task compared to the state-of-the-art UNet architecture. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that incorporating the Lovasz-Softmax loss function to counter class imbalance can boost performance by 3.44% in the component segmentation task over the most employed alternative, weighted Cross Entropy (wCE). Finally, weighted softmax ensembling is found to be quite effective when used synchronously with the Nested Reg-UNet architecture by providing mIoU improvement of 0.74% in the component segmentation task and 1.14% in the damage segmentation task over a single-architecture baseline. Overall, the best mIoU of 92.50% for the component segmentation task and 84.19% for the damage segmentation task validate the feasibility of these techniques for autonomous bridge component and damage segmentation using RGB images.