As civil engineering structures become larger, non-contact inspection technology is required to measure the overall shape and size of structures and evaluate safety. Structures are easily exposed to the external environment and may not be able to perform their original functions depending on the continuous load for a long time. Therefore, in this study, we propose a method for estimating the vertical displacement of structures using light detection and ranging, which enables non-contact measurement. The point cloud acquired through laser scanning was rearranged into a three-dimensional space, and internal nodes were created by continuously dividing the space. The generated node has its own location information, and the vertical displacement value was calculated by searching for the node where the deformation occurred. The performance of the proposed displacement estimation technique was verified through static loading experiments, and the octree space partitioning method is expected to be applied and utilized in structural health monitoring.
Keywords: deflection; light detection and ranging (LiDAR); octree space partitioning (OSP); structural health monitoring (SHM); terrestrial laser scanning (TLS).