Structural Damage Detection Based on One-Dimensional Convolutional Neural Network

This paper proposes a structural damage detection method based on one-dimensional convolutional neural network (CNN). The method can automatically extract features from data to detect structural damage. First, a three-layer framework model was designed. Second, the displacement data of each node was collected under the environmental excitation. Then, the data was transformed into the interlayer displacement to form a damage dataset. Third, in order to verify the feasibility of the proposed method, the damage datasets were divided into three categories: single damage dataset, multiple damage dataset, and damage degree dataset. The three types of damage dataset can be classified by the convolutional neural network. The results showed that the recognition accuracy is above 0.9274. Thereafter, a visualization tool called “t-SNE” was employed to visualize the raw data and the output data of the convolutional neural network. The results showed that the feature extraction ability of CNN is excellent. However, there are many hidden layers in a CNN. The outputs of these hidden layers are invisible. In the last section, the outputs of hidden layers are visualized to understand how the convolutional neural networks work.