Online data fusion using incremental tensor learning

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019. Despite the advances in Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) which provides actionable information on the current and future states of infrastructures, it is still challenging to fuse data properly from heterogeneous sources for robust damage identification. To address this challenge, the sensor data fusion in SHM is formulated as an incremental tensor learning problem in this paper. A novel method for online data fusion from heterogeneous sources based on incrementally-coupled tensor learning has been proposed. When new data are available, decomposed component matrices from multiple tensors are updated collectively and incrementally. A case study in SHM has been developed for sensor data fusion and online damage identification, where the SHM data are formed as multiple tensors to which the proposed data fusion method is applied, followed by a one-class support vector machine for damage detection. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been validated through experiments using synthetic data and data obtained from a real-life bridge. The results have demonstrated that the proposed fusion method is more robust to noise, and able to detect, assess and localize damage better than the use of individual data sources