Resumen
The all-embracing inspection of geometry structures of revetments along urban rivers using the conventional field visual inspection is technically complex and time-consuming. In this study, an approach using dense point clouds derived from low-cost unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) photogrammetry is proposed to automatically and efficiently recognize the signatures of revetment damage. To quickly and accurately recover the finely detailed surface of a revetment, an object space-based dense matching approach, that is, region growing coupled with semi-global matching, is exploited to generate pixel-by-pixel dense point clouds for characterizing the signatures of revetment damage. Then, damage recognition is conducted using a proposed operator, that is, a self-adaptive and multiscale gradient operator, which is designed to extract the damaged regions with different sizes in the slope intensity image of the revetment. A revetment with slope protection along urban rivers is selected to evaluate the performance of damage recognition. Results indicate that the proposed approach can be considered an effective alternative to field visual inspection for revetment damage recognition along urban rivers because our method not only recovers the finely detailed surface of the revetment but also remarkably improves the accuracy of revetment damage recognition.