The Feasibility of Identifying Defects Illustrated on Building Facades by Applying Thermal Infrared Images with Shadow

Abstract

Infrared thermography (IRT) has been widely employed to identify the defects illustrated in building facades. However, the IRT covered with a shadow is hard to be applied to determine the defects shown in the IRT. The study proposed an approach based on the multiplicated model to describe quantitively the shadow effects, and the IRT can be segmented into few classes according to the surface temperature information recorded on the IRT by employing a thermal infrared camera. The segmented results were compared with the non-destructive method (acoustic tracing) to verify the correctness and robustness of the approach. From the processed results, the proposed approach did correctly identify the defects illustrated in building facades through the IRTs were covered with shadow.

Keywords

• multiplicated model
• identify defects
• image segmentation