Collaborative Mobile-Cloud Computing for Civil Infrastructure Condition Inspection

Abstract

Optical imaging techniques have been commonly used in civil engineering practice for aiding the archival of damage scenes and more recently, for image-based damage analysis. However, an evident limitation in the current practice is the lacking of real-time imaging, computing, and analytics capability for team-based visual inspection in a complex built environment. This paper explores a new computing paradigm called collaborative mobile-cloud computing (CMCC) and proposes a CMCC framework for conducting intelligent civil infrastructure condition inspection. Through software design, this framework synthesizes advanced mobile and cloud computing technologies with three innovative features: (1) context-enabled image collection, (2) interactive imaging and processing, and (3) real-time on-demand image analysis and condition analytics. Through field experiments and computational performance evaluation, this paper demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed CMCC framework, which includes verification of real-time imaging, analytics, and particularly, the mobile-cloud computational solution to two representative damage analysis problems regarding complex imagery scenes.