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Defects Detection & Assessment in Concrete Surfaces

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 Intelligent Computing in Engineering - ICE08

Defects Detection and Assessment of Concrete Surfaces

Z. Zhu1 and I. Brilakis2

1
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor, MI. 48109-2125; PH (734) 763-2148; email: zhzhu@umich.edu
2
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor, MI. 48109-2125; PH (734) 764-9420; email: brilakis@umich.edu

Abstract. Aside from cracks, the impact of other surface defects, such as air pockets and
discoloration, can be detrimental to the quality of concrete in terms of strength, appearance and
durability. For this reason, local and national codes provide standards for quantifying the quality
impact of these concrete surface defects and owners plan for regular visual inspections to monitor
surface conditions. However, manual visual inspection of concrete surfaces is a qualitative (and
subjective) process with often unreliable results due to its reliance on inspectors’ own criteria and
experience. Also, it is labor intensive and time-consuming. This paper presents a novel, automated
concrete surface defects detection and assessment approach that addresses these issues by
automatically quantifying the extent of surface deterioration. According to this approach, images
of the surface shot from a certain angle/distance can be used to automatically detect the number
and size of surface air pockets, and the degree of surface discoloration. The proposed method uses
histogram equalization and filtering to extract such defects and identify their properties (e.g. size,
shape, location). These properties are used to quantify the degree of impact on the concrete
surface quality and provide a numerical tool to help inspectors accurately evaluate concrete
surfaces. The method has been implemented in C++ and results that validate its performance are
presented.

Keywords: Concrete surface, air pockets, discoloration, digital image

1 Introduction

Any errors made during construction lead to all kinds of visible defects on concrete surfaces.
The existence of these defects reduces the life cycle of concrete. Moreover, they can make the
owner of the construction project doubt the quality of the finished product. Thus, detecting
and assessing these defects on concrete surfaces is necessary for every concrete construction
project. It is especially necessary for architectural concrete surfaces that are expected to have
a high degree of visual uniformity.

Currently, manual inspection performed by a qualified inspector is the primary inspection

method (ACI 228.2R-98, 2005). It is the first step to comprehensively assess a concrete
structure. If a manual inspection shows no sign of deterioration, technicians do not need to
take any other inspections (Sitar, 2005). However, limitations exist in manual inspection. It
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easily leads to a subjective assessment (Yu et al. 2007), since it heavily relies on the
inspector’s personal experience and knowledge to interpret evaluation criteria. Besides its
subjective nature, manual inspection is time-consuming (Bartel, 2001). The requirement of
experienced inspectors also poses a challenge on the pressing shortage of experienced and
highly trained inspectors in the construction industry.

Automated inspection using visual sensing was introduced as an advanced infrastructure

inspection method (Lee et al. 2006). Most previous research focused on detecting cracks on
concrete surfaces by assuming that their image intensity is sharp and/or their shape is linear
in images (Abdel-Quader et al. 2006; Fujita et al. 2006). Although these methods are
effective in extracting cracks from an image, they cannot be applied directly in detecting and
assessing other surface defects, such as air pockets and discoloration.

The goal of this paper is to investigate detecting and assessing two common concrete surface
defects, air pockets and discoloration. For detecting and assessing air pockets, spot filters are
adopted to locate air pockets’ positions. The number of air pockets is counted according to
filtering results and the size of air pockets is approximated based on the size of the adopted
filter and the level of an image pyramid used. The location, size and number of air pockets
are then used to measure their impact on the concrete surface. For detecting and assessing
discoloration, the standard deviation of gray scale values of a concrete surface image is
calculated to measure the degree of discoloration defects on the concrete surface. The
methods presented in this paper can automatically detect air pockets and discoloration and
quantify their impacts.

2 Background

A large number of automated defect detection methods based on visual image processing
were already available. These methods focus on detecting and assessing cracks, air pockets
and coating rusts.

2.1 Crack Detection and Assessment

Cracks are a complete or incomplete separation of concrete into two or more parts produced
by breaking or fracturing (ACI 201.1R-92, 2005). The process of detecting cracks using
visual images can be divided into three stages: 1) pre-processing; 2) processing and 3)
post-processing. At the pre-processing stage, non-uniform illuminations are removed using
methods such as subtraction (Fujita et al. 2006) and un-sharpening (Cheng et al. 1999). The
image contrast is enhanced for making cracks apparent (Fujita et al 2006; Sinha and Fieguth,
2006; Offrell and Magnusson, 2004).

At the processing stage, crack areas and non-crack areas are distinguished by their contrasting
respective light reflectance values. Thresholding techniques (Cheng et al. 2003), edge
detection techniques (Canny edge detector, Sobel edge detector, Fourier transform and
Wavelet transform) (Abdel-Qader et al. 2003; Hutchinson and Chen, 2006), and region based
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segmentation (Lee and Lee, 2004) are usually applied to achieve this aim. These techniques
seek to extract cracks on the basis of their gray scale values in an image. Thresholding, for
instance, separates dark cracks from light image background. Similarly, edge-detection based
techniques distinguish two regions that have relatively distinct gray-scale values.

Current detection methods are not perfect in precisely extracting all crack areas from an
image. Unwanted noise is still present in the form of short and erratic edges (Sinha and
Fieguth, 2006). Therefore, at the post-processing stage, areas erroneously detected as cracks
have to be removed. Cheng et al. (1999) eliminated dark isolated points using a connectivity
checking algorithm. The algorithm evaluated the extensibility for each pixel in the detection
result along its eight directions. Points whose connectivity was below a threshold were then
removed as noise. Similar work can also be found in Sinha and Fieguth (2006). In their
method, detected crack pixels were initially clustered as crack pieces by measuring the
similarity between each crack point and its surroundings. The clustered crack pieces were
further linked if the distance between the end points of two crack pieces were less than a
threshold. Instead of checking every detected crack point in an image, Yu et al (2007)
searched a crack using the Dijkstra method to find its shortest path in an image when start
and end points of the crack were manually specified beforehand.

2.2 Air Pocket Detection and Assessment

Air pockets are small regular or irregular cavities in the formed concrete (ACI 201.1R-92,
2005). They result from the entrapment of air bubbles during the concrete placement and
consolidation. In order to detect them in an image, Suwwanakarn et al (2007) proposed three
circular filters to detect air pockets on the surface of concrete. One filter with a large size (11
pixels by 11 pixels) is used to detect large air pockets while the other two filters with a small
size (5 pixels by 5 pixels) were used to detect small air pockets. Their method can guarantee
high detection precision ratio (the number of air pockets correctly detected over the number
of air pockets detected) but the detection recall ratio (the number of air pockets detected over
the real air pockets on the surface) is low. Therefore, many air pockets on a concrete surface
cannot be detected. In addition, air pocket detection results using the method presented by
Suwwanakarn et al (2007) are easily influenced in the boundary of other concrete surface
defects, such as cracks and concrete spalling.

2.3 Coating Rust Detection and Assessment

In addition to cracks and air pockets, coating rust defects can also be recognized using digital
image processing techniques. Cheng and Chang (2002) relied on an artificial neural network
to recognize rust defect areas. In their method, a gray-scale image was segmented into three
regions. The average illumination values of these three regions were calculated to generate
three threshold values for these three regions. Image thresholding in these three regions was
finally utilized based on their corresponding threshold values to produce a binary image,
where rust defect areas are represented as black and other areas are represented as white. This
way, the rust percentage can be calculated by the ratio of the black area to the whole image
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area (the black area plus the white area). Lee (2005) presented a systematic work in detecting
and assessing the rust defect on surface coatings. In his work, a rust defect recognition
(RUDR) method was first developed to indicate whether an input image contains rust defects
or not. For any colorful surface coating image, three statistical variables of the image (mean
value in red, DIFF in green and DIFF in blue) were extracted and input to a multivariate
discriminate function. The function was generated according to Wilks’ lambda analysis and
range data analysis (Garson, 2004). The output value of the discriminate function was then
used to determine the existence of rust defects on the surface coating image. If the image
contains rust defects, a rust defect assessment method was used to extract these defects
through color information conversion (Sangwine and Horne, 1998), Hotelling transformation
(Mandaym, 2006) and histogram-based thresholding. The extracted area of rust defects was
divided by the area of the surface to get the rust percentage on infrastructure coating surfaces,
which rated their corrosion degree.

3 Defects Detection and Assessment

Recognizing defects in images is necessary for automated inspection. The recognition work
can be based on image’s intensities, since the intensity of some defects (e.g. cracks and air
pockets) are always lower than the intensity values of normal concrete surface. Besides
image’s intensity information, the shapes of defects can also be used for recognizing defects
in an image. For example, cracks are usually long and linear, while air pockets are circular.
Here, two methods are proposed to detecting and assessing air pockets and discoloration.

3.1 Air Pocket Detection and Assessment

In order to recognize air pockets in an image and at the same time overcome the limitations
of the method presented by Suwwanakarn et al (2007), a novel method for air pocket
detection and assessment was already presented by the authors (Zhu and Brilakis, 2008).
Here, the method is briefly introduced. As shown in Fig. 1, the gray value of an air pocket in
an image is changing from dark at the center of the air pocket to bright at the air pocket’s
perimeter, until reaching the same gray values as normal concrete surface. According to this
characteristic, a spot filter is selected as an air pocket detection filter. The spot filter is
composed of three concentric, symmetric Gaussian filters with weights 1, -2, and 1, and
corresponding sigmas 0.62, 1 and 1.6. Its 3D shape is illustrated in Fig. 2.

Fig. 1: One air pocket in a gray-scale image Fig. 2: The 3D Shape of the selected detection filter

The spot filter is convolved with the image of concrete. The response values of the image to

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the filter indicate the locations of air pockets that are as big as the filter. Compared with an
original concrete surface figure (Fig. 3(a)) and its response values to the selected spot filter
(Fig. 3(b)), it is found that the locations of high response values (the locations of white
regions in Fig. 3(b)) are the locations of filter-sized air pockets. This way, air pockets with the
same size as the filter in an image can be directly recognized. Moreover, the area of these air
pockets can be approximated using the size of the filter.

(a) (b)

Fig 3: Response values of convolving filters; (a) Original image and (b) Response values to the filter

Directly convolving the selected spot filter with an image of concrete can only recognize air
pockets that are as big as the selected filter. In order to recognize air pockets of all sizes, the
image pyramid concept is introduced. The pyramid is a hierarchy of artificially created
images. In each level of the pyramid, an original image is reduced to a certain percentage in
size. When the size of an original image is reduced, the size of air pockets on this image is
also reduced. This way, air pockets whose size is similar to the size of the filter in the original
image cannot be detected by the filter any more, since their size is now smaller than the size
of filter. However, air pockets whose size is previously larger than the size of the filter in the
original image are able to be detected, if an appropriate reduction percentage is selected. The
whole process is illustrated in Fig. 4.

Small air pocket detected in low level

Large air
Adopted
pocket not
filter
detected in
low level Small air
Large air
pocket pocket not
detected in detected in
high level high level

High level

Low level

Fig. 4: Detecting air pockets using an image pyramid

The position of air pockets on the concrete surface can be automatically located by finding
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the position of high response values in each level of an image pyramid. The number of air
pockets on the concrete surface can be calculated by automatically counting the number of
these high response values. Also, the size of air pockets detected in one level of the pyramid
can be calculated through dividing the size of the filter by the reduction percentage this level
adopted. When the number and the size of air pockets are known, the total area of air pockets
occupied on the concrete surface can be obtained by simply adding the area of individual air
pockets. Fig. 5 shows an example of detecting air pockets in a concrete surface image.

(a) (b)

Fig 5: Response values of convolving filters; (a) Original image and (b) Detected air pockets

Two visual impact ratios are further calculated for the sake of assessing the quality of the
concrete surface with previously calculated properties, such as the positions, sizes and
number of detected air pockets. The first one is the percentage of concrete surface that is
covered by air pockets over the total area of the concrete surface. The other ratio is calculated
by dividing the percentage of concrete surface covered by air pockets with the number of air
pockets on the surface. When the first ratio is small/large, it means that the area of air pockets
on the concrete surface is covered a little/lot. If the first ratio is fixed and the second one is
small, it means the number of air pockets on the concrete surface is large compared to the
surface they occupy. The number of air pockets visible from a distance is insignificant in this
case. When this ratio is large, it means that the number of air pockets on the concrete surface
is small compared to the surface they occupy.

3.2 Discoloration Detection and Assessment

Discoloration means the departure of color from that the normal or desired concrete surface
(ACI 116R-00, 2005). One concrete surface image example containing discoloration defects
is shown in Fig. 6. It can be seen that discoloration defects on a concrete surface have no
specified shape, no sharp boundaries and no certain textures. Moreover, according to its
histogram, no obvious threshold value can be selected to differentiate discoloration defects
from the normal concrete areas. Due to these difficulties, the standard deviation of gray scale
values of a concrete surface image is calculated to globally measure the degree of
discoloration defects on a concrete surface. When the standard deviation is small/large, it
means that the departure of color from that the inspected concrete surface is a little/a lot.
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(a) (b)

Fig 6: A concrete surface images containing discoloration defects: (a) original image and (b) corresponding
gray-scale value histogram

4 Implementation and Results

4.1 Implementation

The methodology for detecting and assessing air pockets and discoloration on concrete
surfaces are written in Visual C++. The prototype also used OpenCV (Intel® Open Source
Computer Vision Library) as its main image processing toolbox. OpenCV is a collection of C
functions and C++ classes that implement many popular algorithms about image processing
and computer vision (Intel, 2007). It is free for both non-commercial and commercial use.

(a) (b)

(d) (c)

Fig 7: Process of detecting and assessing air pockets and discoloration with the prototype; (a) open image file;
(b) select detected region; (c) air pockets detection and (d) discoloration detection

A series of screenshots show the process of detecting air pockets on the concrete surface
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image using the prototype developed for this paper. Among them, Fig. 7(a) shows the main
interface of the prototype, where the image can be loaded. After that, users are allowed to
select the concrete surface that need to be inspected, as shown in Fig. 7(b). From the menu,
air pockets are detected (Fig. 7(c)) and discoloration defects are measured (Fig. 7(d)).

4.2 Results

A database of concrete surface images is tested in the prototype for air pocket detection and
discoloration detection separately. One part of test results is shown in Fig. 8 and Fig. 9. In Fig.
8, the visual impact ratio 1 (VIR1) and the visual impact ratio 2 (VIR2) of 11 images are
illustrated. To display VIR2 and VIR 1 in the same figure, the value of VIR2 of each image is
multiplied by 100. VIR1 and VIR2 can be criteria for assessing concrete surfaces in terms of
air pockets. According to the results for these 11 images, it is found that 2% and 0.1‰ (0.1‰
= 1%÷100) can be used as the threshold values of VIR 1 and VIR 2 for assessing the quality
of a concrete surface in terms of air pockets. When the VIR 1 and VIR 2 of a concrete surface
image are both below 2% and 0.1‰, its quality in the aspect of air pockets is acceptable. In
Fig. 9, the standard deviation values of 10 images are illustrated. Similarly, standard
deviation can be a criterion for assessing concrete surfaces in terms of discoloration.
According to the results for these 10 images, it is found that 11 can be used as a threshold
value for assessing the quality of a concrete surface in terms of discoloration. When the
standard deviation value of a concrete surface image is below 11, its quality in the aspect of
discoloration is acceptable.

VIR1 VIR2x100
25

9%
20
Standard deviation

8%
7%
15
6%
5% 11
4% 10
3%
2% 5
1%
0% 0
a b c d e f g h i j k 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Image no. Image no.

Fig. 8: Visual impact ratio 1 and Visual impact Fig. 9: The standard deviation values for 10 images
ratio 2 (multiplied by 100) for 11 images

5 Conclusions

Concrete surface defects are common in the concrete construction industry. These defects not
only impair the normal function of concrete, but also undermine its visual effects. Therefore
inspecting them is essential to guarantee the final quality of the project. Manual inspection is
currently widely used; however, subjective inspection results make it not always reliable.

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Moreover, it is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Automated inspection through visual

sensing is one of methods used to overcome the limitations of manual inspection. Most of
previous research focused on differentiating cracks from the concrete surface background
using image processing techniques such as thresholding, edge detection and image
segmentation.

This paper presents an automated inspection methodology for detecting and assessing defects
on concrete surfaces. Two common concrete surface defects, air pockets and discoloration are
considered. For air pockets, the spot filter was applied on each level of the pyramid of an
image to locate existing air pickets according to their circular characteristics. When air
pockets are recognized, their properties are retrieved. The number of air pockets is counted.
The sizes of air pockets are estimated based on the size of the filter and the level of the
pyramid used. For discoloration, the degree of discoloration is estimated by calculating a
concrete surface image’s standard deviation. All estimated properties are used to
quantitatively assess the quality of the inspected concrete surfaces.

Inspectors can measure the quality of the concrete surface in terms of air pockets and
discoloration with the methodology presented in this paper. Also, inspectors can save time in
inspecting the quality of the concrete surface since only taking pictures of the
under-inspection surfaces is needed during an on-site visit. Owners or general contractors can
save fees for a project in this type of inspection by hiring less experienced and low cost
inspectors instead of experienced ones. The methods presented in this paper were
implemented using Microsoft Visual C++. A database of concrete surface images containing
air pockets and/or discoloration surface defects were tested using the presented methods. The
results validated the effectiveness of the proposed methods. Future work will focus on
assessing concrete surface images using detection results. More images will be tested and
more detailed assessment criteria will be developed.

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