CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORKS FOR DETECTING BRIDGE CROSSING EVENTS WITH GROUND-BASED INTERFEROMETRIC RADAR DATA

Abstract. This study focuses on detecting vehicle crossings (events) with ground-based interferometric radar (GBR) time series data recorded at bridges in the course of critical infrastructure monitoring. To address the challenging event detection and time series classification task, we rely on a deep learning (DL) architecture. The GBR-displacement data originates from real-world measurements at two German bridges under normal traffic conditions. As preprocessing, we only apply a low-pass filter. We develop and evaluate a one-dimensional convolutional neural network (CNN) to achieve a solely data-driven event detection. As a baseline machine learning approach, we use a Random Forest (RF) with a selected feature-based input. Both models’ performance is evaluated on two datasets by focusing on identifying events and pure bridge oscillations. Generally, the event classification results are promising, and the CNN outperforms the RF with an overall accuracy of 94.7% on the test subset. By relying on an entirely unknown second dataset, we focus on the models’ performances regarding the distinction between events and decays. On this dataset, the CNN meets this challenge successfully, while the feature-based RF classifies the majority of non-event decays as events. To sum up, the presented results reveal the potential of a data-driven DL approach concerning the detection of bridge crossing events in GBR-based displacement time series data. Based on such an event detection, a prospective assessment of bridge conditions seems feasible as an extension to previous structural health monitoring approaches.