Challenges of bridge maintenance inspection

Bridges are amongst the largest, most expensive and complex structures, which makes them crucial and valuable transportation asset for modern infrastructure. Bridge inspection is a crucial component of monitoring and maintaining these complex structures. It provides a safety assessment and condition documentation on a regular basis, noting maintenance actions needed to counteract defects like cracks, corrosion and spalling. This paper presents the challenges with existing bridge maintenance inspection as well as an overview on proposed methods to overcome these challenges by automating inspection using computer vision methods. As a conclusion, existing methods for automated bridge inspection are able to detect one class of damage type based on images. A multiclass approach that also considers the 3D geometry, as inspectors do, is missing.