Vibration Sensing of a Bridge Model Using a Multithread Active Vision System

This study proposes a concept for multithread active vision sensing that can measure dynamically changing displacement and vibration at multiple points on civil engineering structures. In multithread active vision sensing, a high-speed camera can function virtually as multiple tracking cameras by accelerating its measurement, computation, and actuation with ultrafast viewpoint switching at millisecond level. This enables simultaneous measurement of small vibrations distributed across a wide range, which cannot be observed using a single camera system, because its pixel accuracy is generally incompatible with its wide angle of view. We developed a galvanomirror-based high-speed multithread active vision system that can switch 500 different views in a second; it functioned as 15 virtual cameras each operating at 33.3 fps to observe multiple scenes in completely different views. The experimental results for a 4-m-long truss-structure bridge model to which 15 markers were attached show that a single active vision system can observe the deformation of the bridge structure and estimate modal parameters, such as resonant frequencies and mode shapes, at a frequency on the order of dozens of hertz.