An Unsupervised Hybrid Approach for Detection of Damage with Autoencoder and One-Class Support Vector Machine

Progressive deterioration and accumulated damage due to overloading, extreme events, and fatigue necessitate the continuous monitoring of civil infrastructure to ensure serviceability and safety. With advances in sensor technology, data-driven structural health monitoring (SHM) strategies, particularly artificial neural networks (ANNs), have gained prominence for analyzing large datasets and identifying complex patterns. Among these, autoencoders (AEs), a specialized class of ANNs, are well-suited for unsupervised learning tasks, enabling dimensionality reduction and feature extraction. This study employs transmissibility functions (TFs) as training samples for the AE. TFs are directly derived from response measurements without the need to measure input and exhibit local sensitivity to changes in dynamic properties, making them an efficient feature for structural assessment. The reconstruction errors in TFs, quantifying the deviation between the original and AE-reconstructed data, are leveraged as damage-sensitive features for classification using a one-class support vector machine (OC-SVM). The proposed methodology is validated through numerical simulations with noise-contaminated data representing various damage scenarios in a shear-building model, as well as experimental tests on a masonry arch bridge model subjected to progressive damage. Numerical investigations demonstrate improved detection accuracy and robustness of the procedure through the incorporation of nonlinear encoding into the dimensionality reduction process, compared to the classical principal component analysis method. Experimental results confirm the framework’s effectiveness in detecting and localizing damage using unlabeled field data.