Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association ISSN:2233-8292(Print) 2287-4747(Online) 한국터널지하공간학회 논문집

Tunnel management is a time-consuming and expensive task. In particular, visual analysis of tunnel inspection often requires extended time and cost and shows problems on data gathering, storage and analysis. This study proposes a new approach to extract information for tunnel management by using a laser scanning technology. A prototype tunnel laser scanner developed was used to obtain point clouds of a railway tunnel surface. Initial processing of laser scanning data was to separate those laser pulses returned from the installations attached to tunnel liner using radiometric and geometric characteristics of laser returns. Once the laser returns from the installations were separated and removed, physically damaged parts on tunnel lining are detected. Based on the plane formed by laser scanner data, damaged parts are detected by analysis of proximity. The algorithms presented in this study successfully detect the physically damaged parts which can be verified by the digital photography of the corresponding location on the tunnel surface.