Automated defect detection for sewer pipeline inspection and condition assessment

To regularly and proactively assess conditions of sewer infrastructure systems to ensure their structural integrity and continuity of services, it is critical to advance the state of automated pipeline inspection and condition assessment. Currently, a critical issue is to address realistic defect detection that deals with real sewer inspection data. This paper presents the findings of a research project that seeks to enable automated detection of defects in sewer pipelines from inspection videos and images. The need for and the challenges of automated defect detection in sewer infrastructure condition monitoring are presented. Based on a general detection and recognition model established in this paper, a change detection based approach which is tailored to solve the challenges in this sewer pipeline domain is described and illustrated through case study.