Laser Scanning Technology for Bridge Monitoring

After the collapse of the Minnesota I-35 bridge (August 1, 2007), there has been a renewed interest in the US to enhance bridge infrastructure monitoring (Liu et al., 2009). Other than developing traditional inspection and material testing techniques, there has been also increased discussions about possible applications of Commercial Remote Sensing (CRS) technologies for civil infrastructure monitoring (Al-Turk & Uddin, 1999, Shinozuka & Rejajaie, 2000, Chen et al., 2011). Laser scanning techniques are one of the remote sensing technologies that play significant role in environmental and infrastructure evaluation and monitoring. However, there are different sensing requirements for monitoring physical structures such as bridges, than conventional geospatial applications such as air quality, environmental impact and transportation operations, etc. The most important of which is the sensor resolution requirement.