Data Anomaly Detection of Bridge Structures Using Convolutional Neural Network Based on Structural Vibration Signals

Structural monitoring provides valuable information on the state of structural health, which is helpful for structural damage detection and structural state assessment. However, when the sensors are exposed to harsh environmental conditions, various anomalies caused by sensor failure or damage lead to abnormalities of the monitoring data. It is inefficient to remove abnormal data by manual elimination because of the massive number of data obtained by monitoring systems. In this paper, a data anomaly detection method based on structural vibration signals and a convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed, which can automatically identify and eliminate abnormal data. First, the anomaly detection problem is modeled as a time series classification problem. Data preprocessing and data augmentation, including data expansion and down-sampling to construct new samples, are employed to process the original time series. For a small number of samples in the data set, randomly increase outliers, symmetrical flipping, and noise addition methods are used for data expansion, and samples with the same label are added without increasing the original samples. The down-sampling method of symmetrically extracting the maximum value and the minimum value at the same time can effectively reduce the dimensionality of the input sample, while retaining the characteristics of the data to the greatest extent. Using hyperparameter tuning of the classification weights, CNN is more effective in dealing with unbalanced training sets. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is proved by the anomaly detection of acceleration data on a long-span bridge. For the anomaly detection problem modeled as a time series classification problem, the proposed method can effectively identify various abnormal patterns.