Zhanxiong Ma, Jaemook Choi, Hoon Sohn,

Three-dimensional structural displacement estimation by fusing monocular camera and

accelerometer using adaptive multi-rate Kalman filter,
Engineering Structures,
Volume 292,
2023,
116535,
ISSN 0141-0296,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.engstruct.2023.116535.
(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0141029623009501)
Abstract: Structural displacements play an important role in the health monitoring
of civil structures; however, the accurate measurement of structural displacements
remains a difficult task. Previous efforts have combined a monocular camera and an
accelerometer to estimate structural displacement, but only in-plane displacements
could be estimated in this way. In this study, the fusion of a monocular camera and
an accelerometer was further extended for out-of-plane or three-dimensional
displacement estimation. A computer vision algorithm and an adaptive multi-rate
Kalman filter were integrated to efficiently estimate high-sampled displacements
from low-sampled vision images and high-sampled acceleration measurements. All
parameters associated with the computer vision algorithm were automatically
calibrated without using any user-defined thresholds. Experimental validation was
performed on two building structures and a 10-m-long bridge structure, and the
proposed method accurately estimated the displacement for all three structures with
a root mean square error of less than 1 mm.
Keywords: Three-dimensional structural displacement estimation; In-plane
displacement; Out-of-plane displacement; Accelerometer; Computer vision; Data
fusion