A Data-Driven Approach for Bridge Weigh-in-Motion from Impact Acceleration Responses at Bridge Joints

Bridge weigh-in-motion (BWIM) serves as a method to obtain the weight of passing vehicles from bridge responses. Most BWIM systems proposed so far rely on the measurement of bridge global vibration data, usually strain, to determine the vehicle load. However, because the bridge’s global response is sensitive to all vehicles on the bridge, the global vibration-based BWIM techniques usually suffer from inaccuracy in the case where multiple vehicles are present on the bridge. In this paper, a data-driven approach is proposed to extract the passing vehicle’s weight and driving speed from vertical acceleration at the bridge joint. As a type of local vibration, the impulse acceleration responses at a bridge joint can be recorded only during a short period when a vehicle is passing over the joint and are thus not sensitive to vehicles at other locations of the bridge. A field test is conducted at a bridge to prepare labeled training data for the use of a convolutional neural network. One accelerometer is installed on the bridge joint to record impulse acceleration, while the vehicle’s weight and driving speed are obtained from a WIM station and a camera near the bridge, respectively. A network that detects the vehicle’s passage as well as its passing lane is first proposed, followed by a 1-D convolutional neural network that uses the raw data of acceleration as the input to predict the vehicle’s gross weight and driving speed. A comparison is made between the 1-D network and an updated 2-D network that uses the wavelet coefficients as the input matrix. The latter one shows better performance, indicating that it is important to choose the proper input data for the network to be trained. A transfer learning technique is used to test the feasibility of the proposed method. Results show that the proposed method can be extended with limited data to bridges other than the bridge where the network is trained.