Assessment of Historic Structures Based on GPR, Ultrasound, and Impact-Echo Data Fusion

Abstract

This paper presents a method for assessment of historic structures based on the fusion of data from ground-penetrating radar (GPR), ultrasound, and impact-echo testing. The method consists of the following steps: measuring, feature extraction, fusion, representation, and evaluation. The employed techniques for an application in scale models of historical walls are described. Thus, experimental deployment; signal feature processing; fusion operators (including order statistics digital filters); 2D non-destructive testing images, and figures of merits of the fused results are explained in detail. The deformation of different imperfections in the material structure related to the application of weight load increments applied on the wall is analyzed by using different kinds of fusion configurations.