An approach for damage detection in noisy environments using DOG multi-scale space and fractal dimension

The most prominent features of fractal dimension analysis are high sensitivity to damage and instant determination of damage location. However, an intrinsic deficiency is that it is difficult to identify damage in a structure while suppressing noise simultaneously. In addition, the vibration measurement with low-spatial-resolution is also the main factor restricting the accurate damage location. In this paper, a novel damage detection method based on fractal dimension is proposed, in order to provide the high-spatial-resolution vibration information, the phase-based optical flow is introduced, which is a vision-based measurement method that can calculate the structural vibration with high-spatial-resolution. Then, to detect damage in a structure while suppressing noise, an advanced signal analysis method is proposed, with this method, the fractal dimension (FRAC) is mapped into Difference of Gaussian (DOG) multi-scale space, producing the FRAC-DOG to reveal damage-induced singularities in mode shapes. Finally, a data fusion technique is applied to the proposed method to provide a reasonable damage detection result that maximises the elimination of uncertainty. The numerical and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can detect damage with high-precision in noisy environments by comparing it with the existing damage detection methods.