THE APPLICATION OF ACCURATE DIGITAL CAMERAS WITH GPS AND USE THE GOOGLE IMAGES FOR MONITORING HIGHWAY BRIDGES

Abstract

The monitoring process is important for any structure for many reasons, but unfortunately most of Iraqi constructions suffer from the lack of their drawings and plans due to different reasons. Such drawings and plans are very important in monitoring process to identify locations of damages, thus a new approach has been applied to monitor highway bridges damages using accurate digital cameras with GPS to determine locations of the damages in site, then such defined locations axis have been used to obtain the related Google images of the site to locate the position of damages on images. Also a new colored code of arrows has been used to locate the damage position and identify the direction of images. It has been proved that using such approach was very successful and will reduce time and efforts due to their activity, accuracy and easiness of both damages recognition or identification of damages location when compared with respect to the traditional method of monitoring process as well as the new approach was essential to solve the problem of missing drawings and plans of the sit.