Fluorescence LIDAR experiments and their integration in a user-friendly platform to support inspection of railway bridges

An effective maintenance plan of railways bridges needs suitable, user-friendly tools for preventive inspection. The latter, actually, when applied to large infrastructures such as railways bridges, requires a large amount of resources and it is time consuming. Presently, most inspection relies only on visual inspection, often with a lack of adequate procedures for documentation filing and an easy consultation of it. In this paper we present a series of experiments conducted with the aim of developing an ICT tool for supporting the inspection of railways bridges. The developed tool integrates a full range of diverse data and guarantees easy access for their storage and consultation. The data integrated in the ICT platform includes images acquired with diverse techniques (3D scanning, high definition photography, photogrammetry, thermography, fluorescence LIDAR) and integrates them with data from traditional survey methods. In order to make easier the consultation to the user, the data are integrated onto a 3D model of the bridge. In particular, we will focus on the results obtained by using the fluorescence LIDAR and 3D LIDAR scanning technique on a masonry bridge for its preventive inspection and their integration in the ICT platform. All data were also complemented with the results from traditional survey methods. False-color coded thematic maps based on fluorescence LIDAR data highlighted the presence of biofilms and patinas on the bridge's surface, providing complementary information with respect to those from thermographic images at large.