Advanced spatio-temporal filtering techniques for photogrammetric image sequence analysis in civil engineering material testing

The paper shows advanced spatial, temporal and spatio-temporal filtering techniques which may be used to reduce noise effects in photogrammetric image sequence analysis tasks and tools. As a practical example, the techniques are validated in a photogrammetric spatio-temporal crack detection and analysis tool applied in load tests in civil engineering material testing. The load test technique is based on monocular image sequences of a test object under varying load conditions. The first image of a sequence is defined as a reference image under zero load, wherein interest points are determined and connected in a triangular irregular network structure. For each epoch, these triangles are compared to the reference image triangles to search for deformations. The result of the feature point tracking and triangle comparison process is a spatio-temporally resolved strain value field, wherein cracks can be detected, located and measured via local discrepancies. The strains can be visualized as a color-coded map. In order to improve the measuring system and to reduce noise, the strain values of each triangle must be treated in a filtering process. The paper shows the results of various filter techniques in the spatial and in the temporal domain as well as spatio-temporal filtering techniques applied to these data. The best results were obtained by a bilateral filter in the spatial domain and by a spatio-temporal EOF (empirical orthogonal function) filtering technique.