VILMA

VILMA is a framework for the mapping and visualization of linear structures such as roads, railway lines, traffic tunnels, water tunnels, airport runways, channels, and pipelines. It unifies a moving data acquisition platform with on-line visualization to keep data acquisition costs and duration low. It incorporates a processing chain for high-resolution surface mapping to cope with future quality standards in surveying and quality engineering. And it emphasizes on the interactive visualization to allow efficient access to the mapping results, managing data of different epochs. 

VILMA consists of a dynamic vision -- sensor setup (e.g. digital cameras, laser scan, thermal imaging), aiming at a geo-referenced data acquisition speed of 1 km / hour in minimum and a mapping resolution of better than 1 mm specifically at on-line selected regions of interest such as cracks or water ingress in tunnels. During data acquisition, on-site visualisation is a major development issue to efficiently guide the operator and immediately assess data usability and quality. The different sensor data is co-registered, geo-referenced, and integrated into a hierarchical surface representation for efficient access to layers of different resolution, thematic content, stage of data processing, and spatial as well as temporal information such as data acquisition time, deformation dynamics, or construction progress. Visualization issues cover the user-friendly real-time random 2D access to surface layers, and a typical set of 3D visualization functions that fulfils the operational and quality needs of the construction and maintenance site. To demonstrate the sustainable VILMA application potential some highly relevant quality management and cost aspects are addressed such as crack detection and evaluation, requirements from geology, and frequent monitoring. The system is scalable in terms of sensor setup, processing complexity and visualization hardware performance. The integration of external sensor data like handheld camera images, the practicability of each system component, assessed by the user, and the awareness to up-to-date 2D & 3D visualization developments are important development drivers. 

VILMA integrates challenging aspects of vision sensor design, 3D reconstruction, recognition, and visualization. The proposing partners unify application awareness, long-term experience in the related scientific topics and proven success of recent joint developments.