Revolutionising building inspection techniques to meet large-scale energy demands: A review of the state-of-the-art

The building sector is responsible for 40% of the overall energy consumption in the EU. Building defects, such as heat losses, moisture, and air leakages, inevitably causes inefficient space heating or cooling, which accounts considerably towards this high energy consumption and associated greenhouse gas emissions. In order to meet the EU's 2050 carbon reduction targets, building inspection techniques need to be revolutionised. Current methods rely on terrestrial or hand-held infrared thermography (IRT) to detect building defects. However, for a large-scale inspection, these methods are generally labour-intensive, time-consuming, costly and often inefficient. The aim of this paper is to highlight the possibility of integrating various state-of-the-art technologies and computational methods with IRT including drones, photogrammetry and AI. This paper presents a comprehensive review of relevant scientific papers and recent developments in such technologies that can retrofit the existing manually intensive methods. Among the findings of this research, feasibility of monocular thermographic photogrammetry integrated on a drone (quadcopter) promises a time-efficient, cost-effective and near-autonomous solution to large-scale building inspections.