A Concrete Crack Inspection Embedded in the Drone-Based System by Using Sub-Pixel Width Estimation and Morphological Component Analysis

Abstract

Human experts have assured social infrastructure inspections, and recently an automated inspection is expected as an integrated system of the flight vehicle with software algorithms of the image processing. For the submillimeter-width concrete-crack detection, we have introduced Morphological Component Analysis (MCA) to be able to find those positions. Conventional image processing methods work well for thick-width crack detections, while the thin-width crack detection is highly difficult. We successfully demonstrated a concrete crack detection from images through proximity cameras in a specialized multi-copter and MCA-based crack position estimations and the linear regression-based sub-pixel width estimation were integrated together. It will open a new door to engineering in the actual field work, which can be widely applicable for social infrastructure inspections in general.