Evaluation of Close-Range Photogrammetric Technique for Deformation Monitoring of Large-Scale Structures: A review

Close-range photogrammetry has been used in many applications in recent decades in various fields such as industry, cultural heritage, medicine and civil engineering. As an important tool for displacement measurement and deformation monitoring, close-range photogrammetry has generally been employed in industrial plants, quality control and accidents. Although close-range photogrammetric application in displacement measurement of large-scale structures was not introduced as much as its other application, but successful utilizations in this field prove it to be a potentially effective procedure in this area. In order to get familiar with these applications, this paper reviews the research conducted on the use of close-range photogrammetry for measuring displacement in large-scale structures. There are several unique advantages of having close-range photogrammetry employed in this field including the unnecessary of being in direct contact to the structure during the observation, the rapid acquisition of observations, and the immediate access to the results by automating the procedures. Moreover, the instant recording of observations in moving features and possibility of creating an archive from these observations to be used in future processing if required are more examples of these beneficial characteristics. In addition, the high flexibility and adaptability of this method to the project conditions made it possible to achieve high accuracies while, each photogrammetric target practically acts as an instrumentation sensor at a lower cost. Accordingly, based on the reviewed literature, on average, this method was able to reduce up to 60% of the costs and time compared to the other conventional methods as an effective and efficient tool.