Detection of delamination in concrete bridge decks using MFCC of acoustic impact signals

G. Zhang, R. S. Harichandran, P. Ramuhalli

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

Delamination of the concrete cover is a commonly observed damage in concrete bridge decks. The delamination is typically initiated by corrosion of the upper reinforcing bars and promoted by freeze-thaw cycling and traffic loading. The detection of delamination is important for bridge maintenance and acoustic non-destructive evaluation (NDE) is widely used due to its low cost, speed, and easy implementation. In traditional acoustic approaches, the inspector sounds the surface of the deck by impacting it with a hammer or bar, or by dragging a chain, and assesses delamination by the "hollowness" of the sound. The detection of the delamination is subjective and requires extensive training. To improve performance, this paper proposes an objective method for delamination detection. In this method, mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) of the signal are extracted. Some MFCC are then selected as features for detection purposes using a mutual information criterion. Finally, the selected features are used to train a classifier which is subsequently used for detection. In this work, a simple quadratic Bayesian classifier is used. Different numbers of features are used to compare the performance of the detection method. The results show that the performance first increases with the number of features, but then decreases after an optimal value. The optimal number of features based on the recorded signals is four, and the mean error rate is only 3.3% when four features are used. Therefore, the proposed algorithm has sufficient accuracy to be used in field detection.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationReview of Progress in Quantitative Nondestructive Evaluation
Pages639-646
Number of pages8
DOIs
StatePublished - 2010
Externally publishedYes
Event36th Annual Review of Progress in Quantitative Nondestructive Evaluation, QNDE - Kingston, RI, United States
Duration: Jul 26 2009Jul 31 2009

Publication series

NameAIP Conference Proceedings
Volume1211
ISSN (Print)0094-243X
ISSN (Electronic)1551-7616

Conference

Conference36th Annual Review of Progress in Quantitative Nondestructive Evaluation, QNDE
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityKingston, RI
Period07/26/0907/31/09

Keywords

  • Acoustic signal processing
  • Bayesian classifier
  • Delamination detection
  • Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients
  • Mutual information

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