Measurement of roof deformation caused by vehicle rollover

A vehicle rollover is a critical accident that could have many causes. This paper describes a novel vision-based system for measuring vehicle roof deformation due to a rollover accident. A vision-based measurement system offers an overall view of structural deformation simply at low cost. Our measurement system was constructed using a Kinect camera from Microsoft, a battery, and a remote-controlled recording computer. Color images and distance maps can be obtained using two sensors embedded in the Kinect along with customized software, and the distance from the camera lens to a specific object can be calculated with a simple equation. To test our proposed approach, actual vehicle rollover experiments were conducted and the resulting roof deformations were compared to those indicated by our system. Moreover, cross-sectional image of Apillar was analyzed to calculate bending moment of inertia. From the research results, it was able to show that deformation errors were within 13 mm, and roof deformation was correlated with vehicle type, or vehicle curb weight.