Current Challenges and Advancements of Aerial Thermography for Outdoor Structural Health Monitoring: A Review

In the rapid development of outdoor structural health monitoring (SHM), infrared thermal imaging and autonomous aerial vehicles (AAVs) have emerged as transformative tools, significantly enhancing maintenance efficiency in expansive outdoor structures. This review highlights the advancements in AAV-assisted thermography, focusing on its impact on the monitoring capabilities of outdoor engineering structures. It introduces AAV-assisted thermographic methods tailored for outdoor environments, explores current challenges influencing their efficacy, and thoroughly examines their integration with machine learning techniques, demonstrating their applications in identifying structural flaws and deformations. Furthermore, the review emphasizes the transformative potential of 3-D thermographic modeling to localize and characterize defects effectively. It contributes actionable insights to optimize AAV-assisted thermographic practices. The findings underscore the importance of integrating AAVs and thermography to overcome the existing limitations in outdoor SHM inspections, setting the stage for a paradigm shift in large-scale outdoor structural condition assessments.