An automated approach to digitise railway bridges

In the UK, the railing sector has a large number of ageing masonry bridges that need to be examined every year. The traditional inspection regime consists of visual observation with manually recording the defect information observed on the structure. Previous studies have shown that this method of inspection is not reliable, time-consuming, depends on the inspector’s judgment and result in further costs to the inspection process. Thus, there is a need to revolutionise the current inspection regime and improve the efficiency and reliability of the acquired data. The development of digital surveying technology such as terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) and progressions in innovative software techniques will support the production of accurate representation of any asset, this automation, which results in achieving a tangible survey of a physical asset in a digital environment. In this paper, a strategic approach for an effective solution to automating the traditional process of surveying and processing point cloud data is presented, with further automation of implementing an automated bridge generation approach to large and complex cloud data sets. The presented digital method will generate a digital asset from the point cloud, and this will support surveyors and engineers to identify defects through various digital means. The presented approach has been tested on real-life projects which have demonstrated time-saving workflow on generating digital assets. This research will demonstrate the effective automation of point cloud to producing a physical asset of a structure with the ability to produce BIM model