Collaborative Mobile-Cloud Computing for Civil Infrastructure Condition Inspection

Optical imaging techniques have been commonly used in civil engineering practice for aiding the archival of damage scenes and more recently, for image-based damage analysis. However, an evident limitation in the current practice is the lacking of real-time imaging, computing, and analytics capability for team-based visual inspection in a complex built environment. This paper explores a new computing paradigm called collaborative mobile-cloud computing (CMCC) and proposes a CMCC framework for conducting intelligent civil infrastructure condition inspection. Through software design, this framework synthesizes advanced mobile and cloud computing technologies with three innovative features: (1) context-enabled image collection, (2) interactive imaging and processing, and (3) real-time on-demand image analysis and condition analytics. Through field experiments and computational performance evaluation, this paper demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed CMCC framework, which includes verification of real-time imaging, analytics, and particularly, the mobile-cloud computational solution to two representative damage analysis problems regarding complex imagery scenes.