Transforming Civil Infrastructure Inspection through Augmented Reality: Technologies, Use Cases, and Integration Frameworks

Civil infrastructure inspection remains labor-intensive, subjective, and hazardous when relying on traditional visual assessments and manual measurements. This review examines how augmented reality (AR) addresses these challenges. The aim is to map the state-of-the-art AR applications across core inspection areas and to evaluate their operational performance. A systematic scoping literature review was conducted over peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings, and industry reports from the past decade, focusing on AR system design, deployment, and empirical results. Results demonstrate that AR tools can reduce inspection time by up to 30 percent, improve defect measurement accuracy to within millimeter-scale tolerances, and support remote collaboration and AI-augmented defect detection. However, there are still major issues with data interoperability, multi-user scalability, spatial registration accuracy, and cognitive load management. While AR has progressed from proof-of-concept to real-world pilots, the review concludes that its broad adoption depends on improvements in tracking accuracy, standardised data frameworks, and integration with cutting-edge technologies like 5G edge computing and AI-driven analytics.