Progress and Trends in Image Processing Applications in Civil Engineering.

What is it about?

Technological advancements in electronic storage have been trending for cloud computing. The revolution of this computer technology with machine learning and artificial intelligence has created prodigious platforms to the various disciplines of science and technology. Civil engineering is the oldest discipline, and due to the never-ending demand of this domain, it is rapidly adapting to newer computer techniques like image processing, deep learning, big data analysis, neural networks, building information modeling (BIM), unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system, digital image correlation (DIC), and many more. In the current paper, we portrayed the primary research and achievements of AI and image processing applications in the civil domain. The paper is divided in two parts. The first part provides analysis of existing methods along with examples relevant to the civil domain where it is incorporated. The second part elaborates scientometric study constituting 605 documents (Science Direct database) published in the last two decades. The bibliometrics are further used for producing analytical frameworks based on publications, citations, top journals, top institutions, and funding sources. This study serves as a guide for readers to identify research gaps and use the review for potential future study.

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Why is it important?

The fundamental mode of transferring and storing data, but with technology advancements electronic storage has been trending for cloud computing. The revolution of this computer technology has created prodigious platforms to the various fields of science and technology which make researchers extend these techniques across all fields. However, when it comes to using digitalization to provide trustworthy data and enhance decision-making processes, the construction industry lags behind other industries [1]. According to Committee for European Construction Equipment (CECE), the civil industry is the least digitized sector. The climatic, environmental, economic, and sociopolitical challenges within civil projects make it difficult in digitization within the construction industry. Since last decade, computer-based monitoring systems and simulations using image processing, AI, ML, and others have piqued the interest among civil engineering community as a cost-effective and unobtrusive solution for image and video data collection and analysis in many construction organizations [1–13]. As a result, several applications were targeted by previous researchers in 3D imaging technologies for construction management, progress monitoring [9, 10], safety [14], and quality control [15, 16]. This review paper concisely emphasizes imaging trends and techniques used for applications in civil engineering.

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