A Critical Assessment of Unmanned Aerial System Usage and Data Analysis in Forensic Assessment
Publication: Forensic Engineering 2022
ABSTRACT
In forensic assessment, new technologies are being developed and implemented at a rate which far outpaces typical updates to design standards. The speed of this technological development and implementation may prove challenging for the field of civil engineering, which relies heavily on considerations from standard of practice, because there must be a strong technical understanding of the precision, bias, and repeatability of a new assessment tool before it may be successfully used for forensic assessment. This paper presents a discussion on unmanned aerial systems (UAS), which are the leading platform for advances in technologies, such as near-infrared thermography, image processing, and machine learning. Advances in these areas are reviewed in this report. While UASs were found to be useful for certain nondestructive forensic assessments, several shortfalls, and common misunderstandings associated with these potential forensic tools were identified and discussed in this report.
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Forensic Engineering 2022
Pages: 537 - 550
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Published online: Nov 2, 2022
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