• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.325-334
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• 2023

Computer vision-based damage detection enables non-contact, efficient and low-cost bridge health monitoring, which reduces the need for labor-intensive manual inspection or that for a large number of on-site sensing instruments. By leveraging recent semantic segmentation approaches, we can detect regions of critical structural components and identify damages at pixel level on images. However, existing methods perform poorly when detecting small and thin damages (e.g., cracks); the problem is exacerbated by imbalanced samples. To this end, we incorporate domain knowledge to introduce a hierarchical semantic segmentation framework that imposes a hierarchical semantic relationship between component categories and damage types. For instance, certain types of concrete cracks are only present on bridge columns, and therefore the noncolumn region may be masked out when detecting such damages. In this way, the damage detection model focuses on extracting features from relevant structural components and avoid those from irrelevant regions. We also utilize multi-scale augmentation to preserve contextual information of each image, without losing the ability to handle small and/or thin damages. In addition, our framework employs an importance sampling, where images with rare components are sampled more often, to address sample imbalance. We evaluated our framework on a public synthetic dataset that consists of 2,000 railway bridges. Our framework achieves a 0.836 mean intersection over union (IoU) for structural component segmentation and a 0.483 mean IoU for damage segmentation. Our results have in total 5% and 18% improvements for the structural component segmentation and damage segmentation tasks, respectively, compared to the best-performing baseline model.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.28 no.3
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• pp.10-18
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• 2024

Vehicle loading is one of the main causes of bridge deterioration. Although WiM (Weigh in Motion) can be used to measure vehicle loading on a bridge, it has disadvantage of high installation and maintenance cost due to its contactness. In this study, a non-contact method is proposed to estimate the vehicle loading history of bridges using deep learning and CCTV images. The proposed method recognizes the vehicle type using an object detection deep learning model and estimates the vehicle loading based on the load-based vehicle type classification table developed using the weights of empty vehicles of major domestic vehicle models. Faster R-CNN, an object detection deep learning model, was trained using vehicle images classified by the classification table. The performance of the model is verified using images of CCTVs on actual bridges. Finally, the vehicle loading history of an actual bridge was obtained for a specific time by continuously estimating the vehicle loadings on the bridge using the proposed method.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.95-102
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• 2005

There are many tube and pipeline in nuclear power plant under high temperature and high pressure. Erosion and corrosion defects were expected on these tube and pipe-line by environmental and mechanical factors. These erosion and corrosion defects ran be evaluated by ultrasonic technique. In these study, Scanning Laser Source(SLS) technique was applied to detect defect and construct image. This technique also makes detection possible on rough and curved surfaces such as tube and pipe-line by scanning. Conventional ultrasonic scanning technique requires immersion of specimen or water jet for transferring ultrasonic wave between transducer and specimen. However, this SLS technique does not need contacting and couplant to generate surface wave and to get flaw images. Therefore, this SLS technique has several advantages, for complicated production inspection, non-contact, remote from specimen, and high resolution. In this study, SLS images were obtained with various conditions of generation laser ultrasound and receiving in order to enhance detectability of flaws on the tube. Stress corrosion cracks were produced on tube and images of stress corrosion cracks were constructed by using SLS technique.

• Korean Journal of Optics and Photonics
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• v.31 no.5
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• pp.205-212
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• 2020

In the performance of a wind turbine system, the blades play a vital role. However, they are susceptible to damage arising from complex and irregular loading (which may even cause catastrophic collapse), and they are expensive to maintain. Therefore, it is very important both to find defects after blade manufacturing is completed and to find damage after the blade is used for a certain period of time. This study provides a new perspective for the detection of internal defects in glass-fiber- and carbon-fiber-reinforced panels, which are used as the main materials in wind turbine blades. A gap or fracture between fiber-reinforced materials, which may occur during blade manufacturing or operation, is simulated by drilling a hole 5 mm in diameter in the middle layer of the laminated material. Then, a digital-image-correlation (DIC) method is used to detect internal defects in the blade. Tensile load is applied to the fabricated specimen using a tensile tester, and the generated changes are recorded and analyzed with the DIC system. In the glass-fiber-reinforced laminated specimen, internal defects were detected from a strain value of 5% until the end of the experiment, while in the case of the carbon-fiber-reinforced laminated specimen, internal defects were detected from 1% onward. It was proved using the DIC system that the defect was detected as a certain level of strain difference developed around the internal defects, according to the material properties.