Automated Assessment of Pier Damage from Multimodal 3D Survey Data

To direct successful port damage repair (PDR) efforts, the Navy requires rapid assessment of topside and underwater pier battle damage using remote sensed 3-D scanned data. Missing as well as damaged components need to be automatically identified and localized so that an appropriate repair crew and materials can be dispatched to quickly restore pier operation. Currently, the Navy uses LIDAR above water and multi-beam sonar underwater to produce 3-D point cloud data of the structure. Analysts manually review these point clouds to plan the facility repair and generate detailed repair instructions using the Pier Reconnaissance Assessment Tool (PRAT). This slow and laborious process is a major bottleneck in PDR efforts. To address these needs, Creare proposes to develop an easy-to-use software tool that automatically and rapidly identifies, localizes, quantifies, and tabulates above and below water pier damage from 3-D scanned data. This tool will automatically analyze the 3-D scan data and deal with the variability in data collection quality, challenges of the marine environment, and variations in pier construction, in a manner that greatly streamlines PDR efforts for the Navy.