Infrared thermography for a quick construction progress monitoring approach in concrete structures

Construction progress monitoring ensures the construction project is consistent with the schedule and enables the detection of any deviations in the geometry and/or any variation in the schedule. The traditional progress monitoring requires specialized personnel to walk around on the construction site to manually collect data and verify the progress of activities, which is time consuming, costly and/or error prone. Image-based technology is effective for recording on-site data geospatially and chronologically. It has gained increasing attention in the construction field for progress monitoring, work space analysis and quality assurance. However, a notable downside of image processing is the light condition, particularly for noisy environments such as construction sites. Poor or undesirable ambient light conditions produce low quality images that significantly affect the accuracy of data extracted from related images and lead to a high level of errors. This paper presents an innovative approach based on thermal image analysis to overcome problems related to the image quality. Thirty preliminary tests and three case studies have been implemented to show the feasibility of the method. A range of improvement between 8 to 48% has been attained that confirms the great potential of thermal images to overcome the limitation of image-based approaches.