A comprehensive structural condition assessment and structural safety of civil infrastructure (bridges, roads, buildings, etc.) is not possible without evaluating the material properties (steel, concrete, timer, masonry, etc.) and detecting surface and subsurface defects. Nondestructive evaluation and testing (NDE and T) methods such as impact echo, ground penetrating radar, ultrasonic surface waves, infrared thermography, etc. have been used for this task for the past half century. Despite decades of effort for NDE and T implementation in structural engineering, though, their applications are still somewhat limited, since the raw data associated with these techniques require user expertise. Introducing automation to NDE and T data analysis could alleviate this issue and would pave the way for more popular implementations of the NDE and T techniques in future. Using artificial intelligence and signal and image processing, especially deep learning models, has shown substantial advantages over traditional data analysis; however, they are either relatively new to the practice or are completely untested for NDE and T techniques. This issue could be associated to the lack of available and reliable ground truth. The editor invites the civil and structural engineering community (researchers, engineers, NDE and T manufacturers, and users) to submit their solutions to the aforementioned issues. The scope of this Special Issue includes but is not limited to the followings: Data papers – Introducing and sharing annotated NDE and T datasets (with reliable ground truth); Technical papers – Implementing of artificial intelligence for NDE and T data analysis; Technical papers – Decision making using data fusion techniques for two or more NDE and T methods; Technical papers – Data augmentation techniques to generate realistic NDE and T data for deep learning implementation; Review papers – History of using artificial intelligence for NDE and T techniques, challenges, and potentials.
Keywords: Ground-penetrating radar (GPR); Impact echo (IE); Ultrasonic surface waves (USW); Infrared thermography (IRT); Signal processing; Image processing; Deep learning; Ground truth; NDE; NDT.