Semi-supervised detection of structural damage using Variational Autoencoder and a One-Class Support Vector Machine

In recent years, Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have been introduced in Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems. A semi-supervised method with a data-driven approach allows the ANN training on data acquired from an undamaged structural condition to detect structural damages. In standard approaches, after the training stage, a decision rule is manually defined to detect anomalous data. However, this process could be made automatic using machine learning methods. This paper proposes a semi-supervised method with a data-driven approach to detect structural anomalies. The methodology consists of: 1) a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to approximate undamaged data distribution and 2) a One-Class Support Vector Machine (OC-SVM) to discriminate different health conditions using damage-sensitive features extracted from VAE’s signal reconstruction. The method is applied to a scale steel structure that was tested in nine damage scenarios by IASC-ASCE Structural Health Monitoring Task Group.