Damage identification of steel bridge based on data augmentation and adaptive optimization neural network

With the advancement of deep learning, data-driven structural damage identification (SDI) has shown considerable development. However, collecting vibration signals related to structural damage poses certain challenges, which can undermine the accuracy of the identification results produced by data-driven SDI methods in scenarios where data is scarce. This paper introduces an innovative approach to bridge SDI in a few-shot context by integrating an adaptive simulated annealing particle swarm optimization-convolutional neural network (ASAPSO-CNN) as the foundational framework, augmented by data enhancement techniques. Firstly, three specific types of noise are introduced to augment the source signals used for training. Subsequently, the source signals and augmented signals are recombined to construct a four-dimensional matrix as the input to the CNN, while defining the damage feature vector as the output. Secondly, a CNN is constructed to establish the mapping relationship between the input and output. Then, an adaptive fitness function is proposed that simultaneously considers the accuracy of SDI, model complexity, and training efficiency. The ASAPSO is employed to adaptively optimize the hyperparameters of the CNN. The proposed method is validated on an experimental model of a three-span continuous beam. It is compared with four other data-driven methods, demonstrating good effectiveness and robustness of SDI under cases of scarce data. Finally, the effectiveness of this SDI method is validated in a real-world case of a steel truss bridge.