Enhancing Vibration-Based Structural Health Monitoring via Edge Computing: A Tiny Machine Learning Perspective

Abstract

Despite the outstanding improvements achieved by artificial intelligence in the Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) field, some challenges need to be coped with. Among them, the necessity to reduce the complexity of the models and the data-to-user latency time which are still affecting state-of-the-art solutions. This is due to the continuous forwarding of a huge amount of data to centralized servers, where the inference process is usually executed in a bulky manner. Conversely, the emerging field of Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML), promoted by the recent advancements by the electronic and information engineering community, made sensor-near data inference a tangible, low-cost and computationally efficient alternative. In line with this observation, this work explored the embodiment of the One Class Classifier Neural Network, i.e., a neural network architecture solving binary classification problems for vibration-based SHM scenarios, into a resource-constrained device. To this end, OCCNN has been ported on the Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense platform and validated with experimental data from the Z24 bridge use case, reaching an average accuracy and precision of 95% and 94%, respectively.