Structural Health Monitoring from the Window Seat of a Passenger Airplane

Abstract

Recent advances in computer vision and graphics have shown that regular, monocular cameras and video (e.g. cell phone cameras and Digital SLRs) can be used to identify the resonant frequencies of structures, and even image visually subtle operational deflection shapes. This paper is offered as a teaser for that work, focusing specifically on an example that may be of interest to people in the structural health monitoring (SHM) community. The discussion is high-level, and presented in an intentionally casual tone (much of the paper presents an anecdote – about recovering the operational deflection shape of an airplane wing using a cell phone and a dish sponge – using the first person). Our hope is to make this text as accessible and painless to read as possible, with hopes of introducing readers from different engineering disciplines to our related work in computer vision and graphics.