“…The latter includes cross-sectional deformation, uneven settlement and stagger between adjacent structural sections [18,19,20]. Different kinds of devices and methods for identifying specific structural defects have been developed in recent years [21,22,23,24]. For example, surface defects in a metro tunnel can be identified by optical imaging, infrared imaging and laser imaging-based devices or methodologies [25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38].…”