Aircraft visual inspection: A systematic literature review

Aircraft visual inspection is a procedure that aims at identifying problems with the vehicle structure. The visual inspection of aircraft is part of the activities of aircraft Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO), and combines multiple observation processes conducted by human inspectors to find irregularities and guarantee vehicle safety and readiness for flight. This paper presents a systematic literature review of methods and techniques used in procedures for the visual inspection of aircraft. It also shows some insights into the automation of these processes with robotics and computer vision. A total of 27 primary studies were considered, including methods, conceptual works, and other literature reviews. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic literature review about vision-based aircraft inspection. The findings of this review show the deficiencies in the literature with regards to requirements specifications for the development, testing, and validation of methods. We also found a scarcity of publications in the aircraft inspection area and a lack of complete intelligent inspection systems in the literature. Despite these deficiencies, our findings also reinforce the potential for automating and improving visual inspection procedures. In addition to these findings, we also present the complete methodology we used for performing this systematic review. This methodology provides documentation of the process and the criteria for selecting and evaluating the studies. Researchers can use this review framework for future investigations in this area of interest. These results should encourage further works on computer vision and robotics techniques, requirements specification, development, integration, and systematic testing and validation.