Exploratory analysis of acoustic emissions in steel using dictionary learning

Abstract

Analysis of acoustic emissions (AE) from steel deformation is a challenging condition monitoring problem due to the high frequencies and data rates involved, and the difficulty to separate signals from noise. The problem to characterize and identify different AE sources calls for methods that goes beyond conventional time and frequency domain analysis. Feature learning is common in the field of machine learning and is successfully used to approximate and classify other kinds of complex signals. Former studies show that AE classification results depend on the choice of predefined features that are extracted from the raw AE signal, but little is known about feature learning in this context. Here we use dictionary learning and sparse coding to optimize a set of shift-invariant features to the AE signal measured in a steel tensile strength test. The specimen undergoes elastic and plastic deformation and eventually cracks. We investigate the learned features and their repetition rates and use principal component analysis (PCA) to illustrate that the resulting sparse AE code is useful for classification of the three strain stages, without reference to the signal amplitude. Therefore, feature learning is a potentially useful approach to the AE analysis problem, which also opens up for further studies of automated methods for anomaly detection in AE.