Monocular vision based 3D vibration displacement measurement for civil engineering structures

Vibration displacement of civil structures are crucial information for structural health monitoring (SHM). However, the challenges and costs associated with traditional physical sensors make displacement measurement difficult. In recent years computer vision (CV) techniques have been employed for measuring vibration displacement in civil structures. There has been a growing interest in CV-based three-dimensional (3D) displacement measurement, as it provides comprehensive information for structural health assessment. Most existing methods use multi-view geometry, requiring multiple cameras for depth measurement. This paper proposes a new system for measuring the 3D vibration displacement utilising a single camera. Instead of using multi-view geometry, deep neural networks are utilised to learn the depth of scenes from monocular images. Compared with the multi-view methods, the proposed 3D measurement system with monocular vision is more cost-effective and much more convenient to set up and use in practice, avoiding the complicated calibration and object matching between multiple cameras. Experimental tests are conducted in the laboratory to investigate the feasibility of the proposed system. Physical displacement sensors are equipped with the testing structure to provide the ground truth data. The results demonstrate that the proposed monocular 3D displacement system is able to produce reasonable 3D full-field displacement measurement, which makes monocular image based CV system a promising approach to achieve 3D displacement measurement, with its obvious advantages in cost and convenience compared to the traditional sensor-based or multi view CV-based methods.