A knowledge-based system for the non-destructive diagnostics of façade isolation using the information fusion of visual and IR images

This paper describes a knowledge-based system for the non-destructive diagnostics of fac ade isolation. The system uses the fusion of information extracted from images obtained from two electromagnetic wavebands: from low-resolution IR images (320 240 pixels; 7.5–13 lm wavelength), and from highresolution visual RGB images (3264 2448 pixels; 0.39–0.75 lmwavelength). The fusion of the information is a perquisite for the design of an efficient knowledge-based system for non-destructive testing and fac ade diagnostics. In the paper, special attention is devoted to the following knowledge-based system components: system-core components (the database, the knowledge base, the inference engine, and the user interface) and application-specific components (image acquisition, the resolution pyramid, image pre-processing and feature extraction, image registration, object segmentation, fusion, and data analysis). Examples of the non-destructive testing and the fac ade diagnostics obtained with the system are presented. 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.