Data-driven structural health monitoring using feature fusion and hybrid deep learning

Smart structural health monitoring (SHM) for large-scale infrastructures is an intriguing subject for engineering communities thanks to its significant advantages such as timely damage detection, optimal maintenance strategy, and reduced resource requirement. Yet, it is a challenging topic as it requires handling a large amount of collected sensors data continuously, which is inevitably contaminated by random noises. Therefore, this study developed a practical end-to-end framework that makes use of physical features embedded in raw data and an elaborated hybrid deep learning model, namely 1DCNN-LSTM, featuring two algorithms - Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM). In order to extract relevant features from sensory data, the method combines various signal processing techniques such as the autoregressive model, discrete wavelet transform, and empirical mode decomposition. The hybrid deep learning 1DCNN-LSTM is designed based on the CNN’s capacity of capturing local information and the LSTM network’s prominent ability to learn long-term dependencies. Through three case studies involving both experimental and synthetic datasets, it is demonstrated that the proposed approach achieves highly accurate damage detection, as accurate as the powerful two-dimensional CNN, but with a lower time and memory complexity, making it suitable for real-time SHM.

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