Structural Health Monitoring for Condition Assessment Using Efficient Supervised Learning Techniques

Pattern recognition can be adopted for structural health monitoring (SHM) based on statistical characteristics extracted from raw vibration data. Structural condition assessment is an important step of SHM, since changes in the relevant properties may adversely affect the behavior of any structure. It looks therefore necessary to adopt efficient and robust approaches for the classification of different structural conditions using features extracted from the said raw data. To achieve this goal, it is essential to correctly distinguish the undamaged and damage states of the structure; the aim of this work is to present and compare classification methods using feature selection techniques to classify the structural conditions. All of the utilized classifiers need a training set pertinent to the undamaged/damaged conditions of the structure, as well as relevant class labels to be adopted in a supervised learning strategy. The performance and accuracy of the considered classification methods are assessed through a numerical benchmark concrete beam.