The Development of a Smart Mobile App for Building Façade Defects Inspections

摘要

The manual visual inspections of façade building defects are posing a high and increasing cost for building asset managers,particularly when inspections delay projects or require asset outages,visits to decommissioned sites or work within hazardous environments.This paper reports on the development,testing and delivery of a working mobile app prototype to facilitate the inspections and documentation of building facade condition monitoring.The work presented builds upon the development of an online platform for remote building inspection based on the integration of methodologies and tools,including VR(virtual reality),and digital photogrammetry to collect real-time data that support automated decision making.The mobile app:(i)allows the user to import 3D models and 2D building plans;(ii)provides the means of first-person exploration of models via a VR headset;and(iii)captures,records and catalogues images of façade defect types,and the date and time.An inspection case study was used to demonstrate and evaluate the mobile app prototype.The Building Inspector app allows building professionals to manage inspections and to track past and ongoing monitoring of the condition of building façades.