Vision-based vibration monitoring of structures and infrastructures: overview of recent applications

Contactless structural monitoring has in recent years seen a growing number of applications in civil engineering. Indeed, the elimination of physical installations of sensors is very attractive, especially for structures that might not be easily or safely accessible, yet requiring the experimental evaluation of their conditions, for example following extreme events such as strong earthquakes, explosions, and floods. Among contactless technologies, vision-based monitoring is possibly the solution that has attracted most of the interest of civil engineers, given that the advantages of contactless monitoring can be potentially obtained thorough simple and low-cost consumer-grade instrumentations. The objective of this review article is to provide an introductory discussion of the latest applications of vision-based vibration monitoring of structures and infrastructures through an overview of the results achieved in full-scale field tests, as documented in the published technical literature. In this way, engineers new to vision-based monitoring and stakeholders interested in the possibilities of contactless monitoring in civil engineering could have an outline of up-to-date achievements to support a first evaluation of the feasibility and convenience for future monitoring tasks.