Deep learning of sweep signal for damage detection on the surface of concrete

Nondestructive evaluation (NDE) is an important task of civil engineering structure monitoring and inspection, but minor damage such as small cracks in local structure is difficult to observe. If cracks continued expansion may cause partial or even overall damage to the structure. Therefore, monitoring and detecting the structure in the early stage of crack propagation is important. The crack detection technology based on machine vision has been widely studied, but there are still some problems such as bad recognition effect for small cracks. In this paper, we proposed a deep learning method based on sweep signals to evaluate concrete surface crack with a width less than 1 mm. Two convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are used to analyze the one-dimensional (1D) frequency sweep signal and the two-dimensional (2D) time-frequency image, respectively, and the probability value of average damage (ADPV) is proposed to evaluate the minor damage of structural. Finally, we use the standard deviation of energy ratio change (ERVSD) and infrared thermography (IRT) to compare with ADPV to verify the effectiveness of the method proposed in this paper. The experiment results show that the method proposed in this paper can effectively predict whether the concrete surface is damaged and the severity of damage.