Nondestructive testing methods used in bridge inspection
Visual inspection – this is the most common form of non-destructive testing as they don’t need any special testing equipment. It can be done quickly and is more economical than the other non-destructive methods but the subjective nature of visual inspection can produce variable and inaccurate results. Digital image processing – Earlier two methods Neuro-Fuzzy Recognition Approach method (NFRA) and the Simplified K-Means Algorithm (SKMA) method (Lee 2011) were developed to recognize surface defects like rusting by using digital color imaging processes. The NFRA methods utilized artificial intelligence to separate rust pixels from the background pixels while SKMA method utilized a statistical approach to separate object pixel from the background pixels. These methods couldn’t generate reliable results under specific environmental conditions. Later on, another advanced method rust-color-spectrum-based rust defect-recognition method (RUDERM) was devel...