Interpretation of Magnetic Sensing for Construction Inspection

The automatic determination of size and location of buried ferrous cylinders from magnetic observables are the focus of this work. Applications include mapping of reinforcement bars embedded in concrete and mapping of pipes buried in the ground. The problem requires an inverse solution to infer the attributes of an inclusion based upon observables which contrast the inclusion from its surroundings. Specifically, the inclusions of interest are ferrous cylinders, the observables are magnetic fields and the surroundings are non-magnetic media. This inverse problem cannot be solved deterministically except for very idealized conditions. The subsystem methodologies developed here derive from the fields of sensing, image enhancement, object classification, knowledge representation, and inference capabilities. The system methodology is implemented to interpret ferrous cylinders from magnetic fields.