Image Assisted Total Stations for Structural Health Monitoring—A Review

Measuring structures and its documentation is one of the tasks of engineering geodesy. Structural health monitoring (SHM) is defined as a periodic or continuous method to provide information about the condition of the construction through the determination of measurement data and their analysis. In SHM, wide varieties of sensors are used for data acquisition. In the following, the focus is on the application of image assisted total stations (IATS). The combination of tacheometry and photogrammetric measurement offers high flexibility and precision. Different approaches of automated detecting and matching whose applications have been tested in practice are briefly explained. A distinction is made between built-in cameras (commercial) and external camera systems (prototypes). Various successful applications of IATS in the field of SHM are presented and explained.