Quantitative scaling evaluation of concrete structures based on terrestrial laser scanning

Scaling of old concrete structures, such as road bridges, is especially conspicuous in cold districts. It is a type of damage where near-surface portions of structures have locally flaked or peeled away, caused mainly by freeze-thaw cycles and deicing chemicals. In this paper, we propose effective methods for the quantitative evaluation of the scaling of concrete structures based on terrestrial laser scanning. We first present a method for evaluating the total scaling depth of concrete structures from their original states based on our customized region growing algorithm. We also present a method for evaluating secular changes in scaling depth based on iterative closest point algorithm combined with a novel feature sampling technique from the time-series scans of structures, and demonstrate the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed methods through various experiments. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.