Highway asset owners in EU face problems with:
a) lack of experienced bridge engineers compared to the extensive work required in inspection of a large number of bridges;
b) interruption of transportation and dangerous operations required in bridge inspection work;
c) the gap between the quality of data available in Bridge Management Systems (BMS) and the information needed for subsequent bridge repair, retrofit and rebuild work.
SeeBridge (Semantic Enrichment Engine for Bridges) targets the development of a comprehensive solution for rapid and intelligent survey and assessment of bridges. Various advanced remote sensing technologies, including terrestrial laser scanner, high-resolution cameras mounted on mobile vehicle and drone, etc., will be used to rapidly and accurately capture the state of more than 5 bridges across the world and produce high density colored point cloud data.
A bridge object detection software will be developed to recognize distinct 3D solid geometry from the point cloud data. An expert system will be developed for classification of bridge components from the 3D solid model and for deduction of supplementary information concerning material types, internal bridge component, etc., using encoded bridge engineers’ knowledge. A damage measurement tool will also be devised to associate the identified defection to the model at the bridge component level.
The output will be a Bridge Information Model that is semantically meaningful to sufficiently provide most of the information needed for decision-making concerning the repair, retrofit or rebuild of a bridge.