Generative adversarial networks for labeled acceleration data augmentation for structural damage detection

Abstract

There have been major advances in the field of data science in the last few decades, and these have been utilized for different engineering disciplines and applications. Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) algorithms have been utilized for civil structural health Monitoring (SHM) especially for damage detection applications using sensor data. Although ML and DL methods show superior learning skills for complex data structures, they require plenty of data for training. However, in SHM, data collection from civil structures can be expensive and time taking; particularly getting useful data (damage associated data) can be challenging. The objective of this study is to address the data scarcity problem for damage detection applications. This paper employs 1-D Wasserstein Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks using Gradient Penalty (1-D WDCGAN-GP) for synthetic labelled acceleration data generation. Then, the generated data is augmented with varying ratios for the training data set of a 1-D deep convolutional neural network (1-D DCNN) for damage detection application. The damage detection results show that the 1-D WDCGAN-GP can be successfully utilized to tackle data scarcity in vibration-based damage detection applications of civil structures.