Sequential Damage Detection based on the Continuous Wavelet Transform

This paper presents a sequential structural damage detection algorithm that is based on a statistical model for the wavelet transform of the structural responses. The detector uses the coefficients of the wavelet model and does not require prior knowledge of the structural properties. Principal Component Analysis is applied to select and extract the most sensitive features from the wavelet coefficients as the damage sensitive features. The damage detection algorithm is validated using the simulation data collected from a four-story steel moment frame. Various features have been explored and the detection algorithm was able to identify damage. Additionally, we show that for a desired probability of false alarm, the proposed detector is asymptotically optimal on the expected delay.