Generalised damage identification scheme via sparse representation

Structures inevitably deteriorate during their service lives. Therefore, the methods capable of identifying and assessing various damages in a structure timely and accurately have drawn increasing attention. From a broader perspective, structural damage identification problem can be regarded as a pattern recognition problem by using sparse representation techniques. The unknown signal/feature from a damaged structure can be associated to a known type of signal/feature in a “dictionary”, leading to damage identification. From this new angle, an innovative damage identification scheme has been proposed by the authors. In this paper, two important techniques of this scheme are further discussed, namely the construction of dictionary and the choice of parameters. The numerical simulated soil-pipe system is used for verifying the performance of the proposed method. The results demonstrate that this damage identification scheme will be a promising tool for structural health monitoring.