A Two-Stage Structural Damage Detection Method Based on 1D-CNN and SVM

Abstract

Deep learning has been applied to structural damage detection and achieved great success in recent years, such as the popular structural damage detection methods based on structural vibration response and convolutional neural networks (CNN). However, due to the limited number of vibration response samples that can be acquired in practice for damage detection, the CNN-based models may not be fully trained; thus, their performance for identifying different damage severity as well as the damage locations may be reduced. To solve this issue, in this paper, we follow the strategy of "divide-and-conquer" and propose a two-stage structural damage detection method. Specifically, in the first stage, a 1D-CNN model is constructed to extract the damage features automatically and identify the damage locations. In the second stage, a support vector machine (SVM) model and wavelet packet decomposition technique are combined to further quantify the damage. Experiments are conducted on an eight-level steel frame structure, and the accuracy of the experimental results is greater than 99%, which demonstrates the superiority of the proposed method compared to the state-of-the-art approaches.