This research aims to examine the feasibility of repurposing existing ceiling-mounted CCTV cameras for post-earthquake structural health monitoring by estimating inter-story drift. The motivation is to address the scalability gap of conventional sensor-based monitoring, where dedicated-sensor installation and maintenance requirements leave most buildings uninstrumented.
A video-based drift estimation pipeline is implemented using a commercial CCTV camera configuration and validated through laboratory shake-table testing. Camera-derived displacement time histories are compared against reference measurements from a laser displacement sensor. To characterize practical operating limits for real deployments, performance is evaluated under representative surveillance-camera acquisition and encoding constraints.
The proposed approach accurately tracks lateral displacement over earthquake-relevant drift levels, demonstrating sub-millimeter accuracy under typical surveillance-camera settings and maintaining reliable drift-based damage screening within a practical range of camera configurations. As acquisition and encoding constraints become more severe, displacement accuracy degrades and tracking robustness can be reduced.
This work provides evidence that widely deployed surveillance infrastructure can serve as a cost-effective and scalable monitoring layer for rapid post-earthquake building screening. Beyond demonstrating feasibility, it offers deployment-oriented guidance on selecting surveillance-camera operating settings to support drift-based assessment without dedicated instrumentation.
