Application of Vibration Data Mining and Deep Neural Networks in Bridge Damage Identification

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to mine the information contained in the bridge health monitoring data as well as to improve the shortcomings of traditional identification methods. In this paper, a bridge damage identification method based on the combination of data mining and deep neural networks is introduced. Firstly, a noise reduction method based on parameter optimisation of wavelet threshold decomposition is proposed, which further removes the noise signal by introducing two adjustment parameters in the threshold function to adapt to different wavelet decomposition layers. Furthermore, the Fast Fourier Transform is used to analyse the feature pattern of the original signal in the frequency domain, and the modal frequency features that exhibit the difference in damage categories are extracted from the spectrogram through sliding windows. Finally, a large number of irrelevant variables with small weight contributions are discarded by principal component analysis, and only the sensitive features with the most informative categories are retained as the input to the deep neural networks. The experimental results show that the new metrics after the feature engineering process improve the ability of damage identification and have stronger robustness, while our damage identification scheme achieves a good balance between the model computation and recognition accuracy. Furthermore, the recognition accuracy of the deep neural networks reaches over 93% with only three feature dimensions retained.