Full-field bridge deflection monitoring with off-axis digital image correlation

Video deflectometer based on using off-axis digital image correlation (DIC) has emerged as a robust non-contact optical tool for deflection measurements of bridges. In practice, a video de-flectometer often needs to measure the deflections at multiple positions of the bridge. The existing 2D-DIC-based measurement methods usually use a laser rangefinder to measure the distance from each point to the camera to obtain the scale factor for the point. It is only suitable for the deflection measurements of a few points since manually measuring distances for a large number of points is time consuming and impractical. In this paper, a novel method for full-field bridge deflection measurement based on off-axis DIC is proposed. Because the bridge is usually a slender structure and the region of interest on the bridge is often a narrow band, the new approach can determine the scale factors of all the points of interest with a spatial straight-line fitting scheme. Moreover, the proposed technique employs reliability-guided processing and a fast initial parameter estimation strategy for real-time and accurate image-matching analysis. An indoor cantilever beam experiment verified the accuracy of the proposed approach, and a field test of a high-speed railway bridge demonstrated the robustness and practicability of the technique.