‘Deep learning’ to prevent bridges and tunnels from collapsing

Dynamic Infrastructure is implementing what it call’s the world’s first ‘deep learning solution’ that can obtain visual diagnoses of bridges, tunnels and elevated highways—offering live, cloud-based 3-D views—and provide automatic alerts when changes are detected in their maintenance and operation conditions, before issues can lead to large-scale failures such as a collapse (example pictured).

“The world faces an infrastructure crisis,” said Saar Dickman, co-founder and CEO. “Deficient bridges and tunnels represent a severe challenge worldwide and their poor conditions can lead to life losses and millions in unplanned expenditures.”

The startup, which has offices in the U.S., Israel and Germany, is conducting projects with a variety of transportation infrastructure stakeholders in those countries, as well as in Switzerland and Greece. Its clients reportedly operate a total of 30,000 assets.

The company’s artificial intelligence (AI) technology creates a ‘medical record’ for each asset, based on existing images captured through periodical condition inspections over years, including images from smartphones, drones and laser scanning. The technology compares the old and archived images to new ones to detect any issues, defects and anomalies. The diagnostics can be accessed via web browser and shared with other professionals involved in the asset’s maintenance workflow.