Blind Drift Calibration using Deep Learning Approach to Conventional Sensors on Structural Model

The deployment of sensors for Structural Health Monitoring requires a complicated network arrangement, ground truthing, and calibration for validating sensor performance periodically. Any conventional sensor on a structural element is also subjected to static and dynamic vertical loadings in conjunction with other environmental factors, such as brightness, noise, temperature, and humidity. A structural model with strain gauges was built and tested to get realistic sensory information. This paper investigates different deep learning architectures and algorithms, including unsupervised, autoencoder, and supervised methods, to benchmark blind drift calibration methods using deep learning. It involves a fully connected neural network (FCNN), a long short-term memory (LSTM), and a gated recurrent unit (GRU) to address the blind drift calibration problem (i.e., performing calibrations of installed sensors when ground truth is not available). The results show that the supervised methods perform much better than unsupervised methods, such as an autoencoder, when ground truths are available. Furthermore, taking advantage of time-series information, the GRU model generates the most precise predictions to remove the drift overall.