ABSTRACT
A large portion of bridges was built after a second World War, mostly over a designed 50-year lifespan. As such, the bridges’ performance is significantly reduced because of excessive usage, overloading, material aging, and environmental impacts. Accurate assessment of a bridge’s condition is needed for maintaining a safe, functional, and reliable structure. In general inspection, visual inspection by on-site inspectors is the predominant method, which is to detect structure changes, identify structural defects, and determine the overall condition. The visual inspection process is subjective and highly dependent upon an inspector’s experience, especially when working in adverse conditions (poor weather and access difficulties). A vantage point of laser scanning, particularly terrestrial laser scanning (TLS), is to flexibly capture the bridge structure with high details of geometry and texture of the structures’ surface. That can be an alternative method to fully or partially replace the visual inspection. Thus, this chapter presents the state of the art of TLS for bridge inspection. This investigation spans from geometric modelling to measurement of structural deformation to detection of structural surface deficiencies.
