Study of damage identification for bridges based on deep belief network

Abstract

To solve the problem of poor anti-noise ability faced by traditional pattern recognition methods in damage identification field, a bridge damage identification method based on deep belief network was proposed. Taken the modal curvature difference as the damage index, three restricted Boltzmann machines were constructed for pre-training. Then, the Softmax classifier and neural network were used to identify the damage location and degree under the environmental cases of no noise, weak noise, and strong noise, respectively. Subsequently, the influence of incomplete measurement modal data on the method was studied. Finally, damage identification based on deep belief network was implemented to a continuous beam bridge and compared with that of the back propagation neural network. The results showed that the proposed method could be highly effective not only on damage location but also on degree identification. Compared with back propagation neural network, deep belief network method may possess better identification ability and stronger anti-noise ability. It also demonstrates good identification effect under the condition of incomplete measurement modal data.