The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences (Dec 2022)
AN APPROACH TO SUBPIXEL ACCURACY WIDENING CRACK WIDTH DETERMINATION IN IMAGE SEQUENCES
Abstract
As an extension to existing work on crack detection and subpixel accuracy crack width determination as a tool for civil engineering material testing, the paper shows an algorithmic approach to handle widening cracks with relative rotations between related crack borders. In the first time step under zero-load, a set of points to be tracked through consecutive frames of an image sequence is defined. Then, subpixel-precise displacement fields are computed for the image data of the following time steps using an 8-parameter least-squares matching approach. The points are triangulated into a mesh, and the changes of the inner geometry of the triangles are considered with a mathematical model assuming a split of each triangle. With this model, subpixel-precise deformation vectors are derived. Crack candidates are determined by a thresholding applied to the vectors’ lengths. After an estimation of the crack normal, a decomposition of the deformation vectors is applied, allowing to compute crack widths and shear movements. As a novel contribution to the technique, a model extension is proposed for the case of a relative rotation between the crack borders in order to reduce systematic errors. The model includes two separate rigid transformations for each crack side.