A dilated convolution‐based method with time series fine tuning for data‐driven crack length estimation

This paper presents a novel crack size estimation method based on dilated convolution and time series fine tuning using in‐situ Lamb wave. The contributions of this proposed method are twofold: (1) a dilated convolution‐based neural network which is an effective representation learning methods with larger receptive fields for periodic signals and (2) a crack length adjustment approach based on previous estimations with a time series fine tuning method. The time series fine tuning method utilizes the monotonicity of the crack length with respect to time. A new evaluation metric has been adopted, which considers prediction errors, time errors, and monotonicity errors. The proposed method outperforms the previous feature extraction‐based methods with or without time series fine tuning in this new evaluation metric.