Vision-based displacement measurement method for high-rise building structures using partitioning approach

The horizontal displacement of a high-rise building structure is usually considered as one of the major indicators to assess the structural safety. It is, however, difficult to directly measure the displacement of such a flexible structure due to the inaccessibility to a reference point usually needed for conventional displacement sensors and the huge size of the structure. In order to resolve this issue, a novel vision-based displacement measurement technique is proposed by employing a partitioning approach (i.e., successive estimation of relative displacements and rotational angles throughout a large flexible structure). A series of the experimental tests using two webcams installed on a flexible steel column structure have been conducted to validate the feasibility of the proposed method. The test results showed that the difference between the displacement measured from the proposed method and the exact value is less than 0.5%. Therefore, the proposed method could be considered as one promising candidate for measuring the displacement of high-rise building structures. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.