Three-Dimensional Reconstruction-Based Vibration Measurement of Bridge Model Using UAVs

This paper presents a measurement method of bridge vibration based on three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction. A video of bridge model vibration is recorded by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), and the displacement of target points on the bridge model is tracked by the digital image correlation (DIC) method. Due to the UAV motion, the DIC-tracked displacement of the bridge model includes the absolute displacement caused by the excitation and the false displacement induced by the UAV motion. Therefore, the UAV motion must be corrected to measure the real displacement. Using four corner points on a fixed object plane as the reference points, the projection matrix for each frame of images can be estimated by the UAV camera calibration, and then the 3D world coordinates of the target points on the bridge model can be recovered. After that, the real displacement of the target points can be obtained. To verify the correctness of the results, the operational modal analysis (OMA) method is used to extract the natural frequencies of the bridge model. The results show that the first natural frequency obtained from the proposed method is consistent with the one obtained from the homography-based method. By further comparing with the homography-based correction method, it is found that the 3D reconstruction method can effectively overcome the limitation of the homography-based method that the fixed reference points and the target points must be coplanar.