Research on the inspection technology of the urban public areas

This paper develops an automatic system for the surface distress inspections on the urban public areas, including sidewalks, squares, and parking lots. This inspection system integrates an industrial 3D camera, a positioning system supporting both GNSS and Beidou, a distance measurement instrument (DMI), an inertial measurement unit (IMU), a power supply, a time synchronization technology, and a data acquisition software, such that it can collect 3D images of the surfaces of the urban public areas at a normal walking speed (~5km/hr). This inspection system has several advantages over the traditional manual inspections, such as low cost, high efficiency, low power consumption and compacted size. The field tests are conducted on the urban public areas in Nan’an District to validate the effectiveness of the inspection system. The engineering applications indicate that the inspection system works well and collects high-quality 3D images in either time mode or distance mode. The collected 3D images will be used for further analysis of the surface distress extractions, such as crack, pothole, and faulting. Finally, a basic neutral network is created to determine if there are distresses in the 3D images from field tests with the accuracy higher than 90%, which is very promising.