Rebar Detection and Localization for Non-destructive Infrastructure Evaluation of Bridges Using Deep Residual Networks

Nondestructive Evaluation (NDE) of civil infrastructure has been an active area of research for the past few decades. Traditional inspection of civil infrastructure, mostly relying on visual inspection is time-consuming, labor-intensive and often provides subjective and erroneous results. To facilitate this process, different sensors for data collection and techniques for data analyses have been used to effectively carry out this task in an automated manner. The purpose of this research is to provide a novel Deep Learning-based method for detection of steel rebars in reinforced concrete bridge elements using data from Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR). At the same time, a novel technique is proposed for the localization of rebar in B-scan images. In order to examine the performance of the rebar detection and localization system, results are outlined to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed system within relevant practical applications.