-
So now that we ...
-
... I'm a programmer ..
-
... I hope that we're going to get a bigger soon ...
-
We specialise in masonry. Masonry bridges in particular.
-
We do a few other bits and pieces, but the core is basically bridges.
-
We're always looking for new ...
-
Sorry!
-
...
-
Hopefully that doesn't trouble.
-
So I think we're looking for ways to understand damage better, and in masonry that is an interesting task.
-
And in the last couple of years we've done a lot of work on developing photogrammetry
-
which we believe has the potential to transform inspection and assessment of historic bridges ...
-
... and all masonry bridges ...
-
But really all masonry bridges are historic bridges.
-
I don't have to tell most people here, I think, about photogrammetry, so I'll cut out all my usual slides.
-
The basic process is you take a lot of photos, with lots overlap ...
-
... compress them down into a model and then you profit from the results
-
Reality is obviously a bit more detailed.
-
I'm not going to talk about processing a basic trick that we have here ...
-
... is big workstation and reality capture. Which is fantastic.
-
Taking photos is more of an issue, and how you get information out of the data that we produce is the second part.
-
A couple of case studies.
-
Pontypridd Old Bridge was built in 1750.
-
It was the fourth attempt that Williams Edwards made.
-
He was given a 7 year contract to cross the Taff at this point.
-
The first attempt was a 3 span washed out by floods.
-
He thought, well sod that. if I'm going ... to go in 1 step
-
That one, the centering collapsed before the bridge was finished.
-
Not being put off, he did it again, did the centering a bit better.
-
Successfully structured the centering.
-
Six weeks later the bridge collapsed.
-
And it collapsed in a particular way
-
with the crown bursting upwards and the sides going in.
-
So he then gathered a little bit more money together from the gentry of the area
-
who must have been quite ...
-
... he must have been quite compelling, or maybe it was the fact that he was a well respected preacher.
-
Well he must have thought so anyway.
-
He gathered these transverse tubes at the sides of it where it's out ...
-
... and if you look at the top of it you'll see there's a partition ... at the top ...
-
... and it's been there since 1786.
-
100 years later they built this bridge along the side, that's been widened since.
-
And now it runs to about half a meter from the circle ...
-
So since 1850, or it seems, the south elevation ...
-
Capturing photographs of this, what we're aiming to do is to get set sub-millimeter detail from the whole structure.
-
It's big. It's 43 meter span. It's all rubble masonry, basically lots of roughness, lots of detail.
-
The crown is about 10 meters off the water.
-
Victoria Bridge is very close, which ...
-
And at least there was a ford here, so in the driest summer in recent years it was certainly possible walk backwards and forwards underneath.
-
And we ended up with 14,000 photos.
-
That's taken straight from reality capture. And reality capture can take 14,000, or indeed up to 30,000 quickly photos.
-
And align them.
-
30,000 took me within a gnat's whisker of 256gb of memory.
-
But it just does it.
-
And you finish up with a model that allows you to step back and look.
-
This is the south elevation. No-one has seen that for 170 years.
-
In this view ...
-
... 5 million triangles with a very high detailed texture that ...
-
... mesh means that the texture is just slightly blurred on these rock surfaces.
-
But we can zoom in and see cracks, and we can see details that we wouldn't really understand without the photographs.
-
... for bridge inspection is much a detailed photograph site as issue here.
-
Forced out.
-
And so being able to understand that damage in context is pretty good.
-
Being able to read the full photographic elevation of light to measure things.
-
And we can zoom in to have a look.
-
For some reason, it's not quite as good on the software, which is annoying ..
-
.. but this allows you to see ...
-
... it's still pretty good. You can see individual bits ...
-
A bit on collection.
-
We don't use drones.
-
We don't have the scale to justify having the the utilisation that justifies the licensing costs.
-
And anyway, I've yet to come to a bridge and find that half of it is only accessible to a drone.
-
No trees. There's not a bridge next to it. It's next to traffic ...
-
It will be useful for the some bits of it ...
-
.. but we don't have to deal with this stuff anyway.
-
So there we are ... standing in the river we've got some mud weights attached to the bottom of the pole for balance.
-
And we can get it to about 8 meters.
-
Different bridge, and we can stick it out over the side.
-
...
-
And we have camera rigs.
-
So this is set of Sony QX1 cameras all strapped to a 6 meter beam.
-
The triggers are powered on a wire so they trigger almost constantly ...
-
... they're carbon batteries, so there's always one that's running out of battery.
-
You can't take it in and change the battery if it's tied a beam.
-
... Here you could walk into the swinging ...
-
... rigged up the Sony to the side ...
-
And why bother? It's a lot of effort. But ...
-
The ability to zoom in and see that detail, and then step back and see where it is.
-
I keep doing that in the office ...
-
... where it's warm ...
-
It's just unnatural.
-
The problem is we get a lot of data.
-
We don't need the data. We're looking for understanding.
-
Just having the model is a step forward.
-
We have a point cloud. You've got a vast amount of data ...
-
... you can convert that into a mesh, and bring the data level down and get more access.
-
Photogrammetry gives you a bit of a much better place, and just having the model to look at is good.
-
But we need to do more to interrogate them and extract information to learn the stories we have to tell
-
and then we also need to share those stories with other people.
-
So we've been working on a viewer with a few simple tools to help us take the model and say what's going on here.
-
A very quick at an an 1830s canal bridge and then a bit of a bit of a look at a Clifton suspension bridge.
-
One slightly sad bridge, and also very faint.
-
It's just a standard canal bridge. You can see cracks here.
-
About an hour on site and 2000 photos got us this and gave us this level of detail, where we can see into every crevice
-
we can see all those lost bricks, and we can see how this bit dropped here.
-
And we can look around it.
-
So far, so good.
-
But we need to understand what's happening. Why is the brickwork here? What's going on?
-
And what we can do with the viewer is ...
-
We know there's something funny about the crown. Let's put in a horizontal plane through the point.
-
And it gives us an imaging contact.
-
So this is used for the shading engine.
-
We can see the intersection. We can see that it's lower here. That there's a ...
-
... at this point.
-
At this end there's also mould, but not nearly to the same extent ...
-
... and all of that lets us start to get an understanding of what's going on interactively.
-
So we can contour this. We can say we've got a mesh, we're going to do a set of contours.
-
We've got to decide what contours and what spacing.
-
With this ...
-
... and play and move it around and see what it is and then go and start producing your contours.
-
...
-
This is the Clifton suspension Bridge. You may be familiar with it.
-
Clifton's over on this side, and Leigh Wood's over here.
-
This buttress built up about 10 years ago.
-
Somebody doing some maintenance on the deck lifted a stone up and realised oh there's a big hole here.
-
There's a shaft that goes down and they looked up and -- from there -- they could see that the shaft goes right down to the depths of the buttress.
-
And obviously they explored further and discovered that around the shaft there's this whole network of vaults.
-
So the road comes up over the river, runs along the central vault, and there were these two at the back and off the line.
-
And nobody had thought, that's a massive abutment ...
-
But once you know they're there you have to expect them. You have to know you're safe.
-
Out of sight, out of mind.
-
Just out of interest.
-
We've got a laser scanner there. This was early in our photogrammetry exploration. We didn't know if it was going to work in pitch dark.
-
So we needed the geometric information as well, and we got the laser scan, we got 45GBs
-
converted that into a textured image
-
200MB that we can load onto a normal PC.
-
These models are about 200MB as well, per vault.
-
This is ... we come in through this tunnel, past this shaft, having gone up another tunnel ...
-
... coming in from the other level through a ladder in the shaft ...
-
...at my height you have to remember to put your hand up before you get into it because you can't move your elbow.
-
We find if we look at the bottom bit and turn it around ...
-
... we've got these things that throw cast iron ties into the walls ...
-
... that have been there since this was finished and closed. And they're is packed with timber.
-
You can see there that they were vertical timbers, with just a bit missing in the middle.
-
This one was filled with water before the others were discovered.
-
And it was obviously a very stable level. It's moved up and down by about a foot.
-
And the timber has rotted where that's happened and there's now coral down there ...
-
You can look up the top and view along these things which are 10 meters up in pitch dark
-
and you can see that tie is shining quite brightly.
-
There's no attention to it.
-
If we look to ...
-
... we can see a crack.
-
We couldn't see that until we looked at the model.
-
There's no way ...
-
... that by the time you've wriggled into that space, shining a torch ...
-
... that you're got to catch features like that ...
-
... but once you got this you can look at and take your time with about, you can see things that you wouldn't see otherwise.
-
We can move the plain across here as well.
-
And ... the plain.
-
I've set that to just roundabout about springing where the whole starts turning in.
-
You can turn it over clipping plain and change the clipping direction.
-
You can go to photographic ... view from below.
-
And then next to him ...
-
... colouring.
-
So if we take a normal vector for every triangle and cover the mesh with that, we can very quickly see changes in matter.
-
So you can see that although the shape of the bottom planes have curved sides and corners that is carried right onto the bulk of the top.
-
But we can also see very quickly that there are orange stripes all the way around here
-
...
-
So we can start to learn that the walls are built quite easily once we got to the top and built freehand as far as we could.
-
Because working up there, if we built a center...
-
... you'd be fighting trying to work out ...
-
... and you stand at the platform ...
-
and only at the very top do you put the center in and finish it.
-
So you can see that it's smooth at the sides. Smooth at the top where the wood would be worked on ...
-
... there's always roughness in ... masonry.
-
And there are interesting things like this.
-
These stones were embedded in the stones. The stones actually slipped forwards as they were building it.
-
We're going back there next week to do the top level.
-
So those models are of the bottom, and we're going to back there and do the top one.
-
I'm a bit nervous about that ...
-
...
-
I've been developing a bit of extra kit to try and speed up the process and not just go like ...
-
So developing an understanding of defects is really hard.
-
Textured meshes are a lot more useful than point cloud in this respect, and that's not just if you're in the dark.
-
It's possible to get sub millimeter details for very big structures ...
-
And being able to take snapshots in time at very high detail gives you an ability to rethink
-
... whether it's just because you've thought of something and you need to go back and have a look
-
or because you're looking at it again for a second time.
-
Thank you.
-
[APPLAUSE]