Laser scanning for bridge inspection and management

The current process for acquiring bridge geometric data for the National Bridge Inventory (NBI) is based on manual surveying, manual data processing and interpretation. Hence, it is time-consuming and error-prone. This paper presents a laser-scanning-based approach to acquire geometric data for bridge inspection, describes a case study and discusses the advantages of this approach over current practice from the perspectives of both bridge inspection and management. Both current approach and laser-scanning based approach are composed of three major steps of data collection, data processing and data interpretation. Yet, a comparison of these approaches highlights major differences in the accuracy and comprehensiveness of the data collected. Based on the comparison, we suggest a need for a formalized way to decompose higher level bridge inspection goals to enable successful application of laser scanning technology for bridge inspection.