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OPEN Deep neural network‑based

structural health monitoring
technique for real‑time crack
detection and localization using
strain gauge sensors
Jiyoung Yoon 1,5, Junhyeong Lee 2,5, Giyoung Kim 3, Seunghwa Ryu 2* & Jinhyoung Park 4*

Structural health monitoring (SHM) techniques often require a large number of sensors to evaluate
and monitor the structural health. In this paper, we propose a deep neural network (DNN)-based
SHM method for accurate crack detection and localization in real time using a small number of strain
gauge sensors and confirm its feasibility based on experimental data. The proposed method combines
a DNN model with principal component analysis (PCA) to predict the strain field based on the local
strains measured by strain gauge sensors located rather sparsely. We demonstrate the potential of
the proposed technique via a cyclic 4-point bending test performed on a composite material specimen
without cracks and seven specimens with different lengths of cracks. A dataset containing local strains
measured with 12 strain gauge sensors and strain field measured with a digital image correlation (DIC)
device was prepared. The strain field dataset from DIC is converted to a smaller dimension latent space
with a few eigen basis via PCA, and a DNN model is trained to predict principal component values of
each image with 12 strain gauge sensor measurements as input. The proposed method turns out to
accurately predict the strain field for all specimens considered in the study.

Structural damage reduces the lifespan and reliability of engineering structures such as aircraft, buildings, and
bridges, and can lead to serious fatalities and economic losses. The monitoring of structural damage is essential to
improve the lifetime safety, maintainability, and reliability of structures. Therefore, structural health monitoring
(SHM) techniques have been developed to monitor the extraction of damage-sensitive features such as strain,
acoustic emission (AE), vibration signals, and electromechanical impedance, recorded using various sensors
installed on the structure and determine the current state of structural health through statistical analysis of the
extracted ­features1–6. Recently, with the development of high-performance graphics processing units and parallel
computing, convolutional neural networks (CNN)-based approach using the 2D images for detecting damage
have been ­proposed7–10.
AE-based SHM can quantitatively identify damage by analyzing the characteristics of elastic waves in the
monitored structure. However, the detected elastic waves can be very complicated and difficult to analyze because
their propagation through the structure is influenced by dispersion and geometric b ­ oundaries11. Alternatively,
vibration-based SHM is used to monitor structural damage by analyzing vibrational characteristics such as
natural frequencies, mode shapes, damping, and frequency response functions. However, it is difficult to moni-
tor dynamic structures such as ­aircrafts12 because the influence of ambient noise and vibrations increases the
difficulty in extracting the vibrational characteristics and the damaged signal can be concealed by uncertainties.
By utilizing the variation of the mechanical impedance under structural damage, electromechanical imped-
ance -based SHM can identify failures by monitoring the structure’s mechanical impedance using the electrical
impedance of piezoelectric (PZT) sensors attached to the monitored structure. However, because PZT sensors

1
Advanced Mechatronic R&D Group, Korea Institute of Industrial Technology, Daegu 42994, Republic of
Korea. 2Department of Mechanical Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology,
Daejeon 34141, Republic of Korea. 3Department of Mechanical Engineering, Kyungpook National University,
Daegu 41566, Republic of Korea. 4School of Mechatronics Engineering, Korea University of Technology and
Education, Cheonan 31253, Republic of Korea. 5These authors contributed equally: Jiyoung Yoon and Junhyeong
Lee. *email: [email protected]; [email protected]

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are brittle, external load or impact and environmental disturbances may lead to bonding defects and sensor
­breakage13. Because the measured impedance is very sensitive to temperature and environmental noise or vibra-
tion, robust compensation methods must be d ­ eveloped14. CNN-based SHM can identify pixel-level cracks in
2D images according to the functionality of a given algorithm, allowing it to detect the presence of cracks in an
inspection image or to identify the precise pixels where the crack. However, it is used to detect cracks in fixed
structures such as pavement and bridge deck, not dynamic structures such as aircraft because a camera device
is required to collect high-resolution images of the target s­ tructures15–17.
Strain is a direct indicator of stress associated with damage. Hence, strain-based SHM, as realized through
strain measurements using strain gauge sensors or fiber optic sensors, has gained increasing popularity as a
reliable method for real-time strain measurements. In addition, because cracks are an important feature for
determining the damage condition of structures, strain-based crack monitoring techniques for crack detection
provide a qualitative indication of the presence of cracks and enable their localization. These techniques are
already in use for SHM approaches in the aerospace industry and have been extensively researched in the last
2 decades. Ramdane et al. theoretically and experimentally investigated the identification of crack positions,
inclinations, and lengths, as well as the magnitudes of external loading based on data from 8 to 12 strain gauges
distributed along the edges of a rectangular plate by using the concept of distributed dislocations in conjunction
with a genetic algorithm (GA)18,19. Haim et al. investigated the detection of straight cracks, circular holes, and
holes with arbitrary shapes based on strain measurement sensors by using the extended finite element method
and genetic algorithms (GA)20,21. Liang et al. investigated the identification of holes and cracks in composite
plates for multiple static loading modes by using strain gauge sensors and a nonlinear optimization program
that applied the boundary element method and genetic ­algorithm22. Yong et al. proposed a crack detection and
localization method for elastic structures that combined a rectangular strain rosette structure with three fiber
Bragg gratings (FBGs), body force method, and an improved particle swarm optimization (PSO) a­ lgorithm23.
Thus, previous strain-based SHM studies applied optimization algorithms such as GA and PSO, using a small
number of strain gauge sensors or FBG sensors to identify the crack detection and localization of structures. In
this case, the crack damage cannot be monitored in real time because the optimization algorithm requires a large
number of iterations to converge to the actual crack location and length. If the crack damage is not discovered
and repaired in time, the service life of the structure will be reduced and the maintenance cost will increase.
Therefore, real-time detection and localization of crack damage is an important requirement.
In this paper, we propose a machine learning-based method for accurately detecting and localizing cracks
in real time using a small number of strain gauge sensors. The feasibility of the approach was verified based on
experimental data. Because stress concentration occurs at the crack tip, it is possible to detect the cracks, deter-
mine their position and length, and monitor their growth through real-time strain field analysis. For specimens
without damage and specimens with various types of damage, a dataset of local strains measured with 12 strain
gauge sensors and their corresponding strain field maps over a wide domain measured with digital image cor-
relation (DIC) devices were used to train and evaluate the DNN model performance. The high dimensional
strain field map (14 × 12 pixel image) is compressed into a smaller dimension latent space via PCA to reduce the
output dimension for the DNN . The trained DNN takes the 12 strain gauge measurements as input and accu-
rately predict the strain field map over a wide domain. The feasibility of the proposed method is demonstrated
for real-time SHM for cyclic 4-point bending test.

Methodology
Figure 1 shows the real-time crack-damage monitoring system, which predicts the strain field through a machine
learning model with a small number of strain gauge sensors. The target monitoring structure is an aircraft.When
the aircraft is on the ground, resting on its landing gear, the force of gravity attempts to bend the wing downward.
An aircraft in flight experiences a bending force on its wing as an aerodynamic lift attempts to raise the ­wing24.
Therefore, the aircraft wing is subjected to cyclic bending moment. We prepared a dataset consisting of local
strains measured with 12 strain gauges and strain field measured with the DIC device for one specimen without
damage (Healthy) and seven specimens with various lengths of edge cracks (Damaged) under a cyclic bending
moment. The specimen was made of a composite material laminated carbon fiber-reinforced plastic (CFRP)
generally used in ­aircraft25. To preprocess the strain field, we represented all the strain field map from DIC in 168
dimensions (14 × 12 pixel image) and reduced them to eight dimensions (referred to as eight principal compo-
nent values, hereafter) by employing P ­ CA26,27. The dimensionality reduction process is important for reducing
the computational time and enhancing the training accuracy of DNN. Finally, the DNN model used the local
strains measured with the 12 strain gauge sensors as input and predicted the eight principal component values.
The DNN model prediction was transformed back into a regular strain field. By analyzing the predicted strain
field, the feasibility of real-time monitoring of crack detection and localization was verified.

Experiments. This section presents the experimental process for preparing the training, validation, and
testing datasets for crack detection and localization of the composite using machine learning.

Specimen preparation. Figure 2a shows the schematic of the specimen geometry and preparing process of the
specimens. The dimensions of the specimens were 200 mm (length) × 100 mm (width) × 1 mm (height). Eight
specimens were prepared, one crack-free healthy specimen and seven damaged specimens with cracks of differ-
ent lengths at a fixed position. The CFRP specimen was produced by compression molding a 4-ply carbon fiber
epoxy resin woven prepreg with a thickness of 0.26 mm. In the curing cycle for this prepreg, the temperature
was ramped up to 125 °C and held for 2 h before allowing the material to cool in a conventional thermal heating
environment. The in-plane Young’s modulus of the composite material was 60 GPa. All specimens with cracks

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Figure 1.  Framework of the proposed method for real-time structural health monitoring using strain gauge
sensors.

were prepared using a waterjet cutting machine for crack fabrication. The crack was located at the edge of the
symmetry line in the rectangular specimen.

Experimental setup. A cyclic 4-point bending test was performed using a uniaxial hydraulic testing machine
(MTS Systems) to determine the strain of the specimens. Loading was applied for 10 cycles with displacement
control from 0 to 20 mm at a speed of 0.1 Hz (Fig. 2b). Figure 2c depicts the experimental setup for measuring
the strain in the x-direction using uniaxial strain gauge sensors (KFGS series, Kyowa Electronics). The strain
gauge sensors consist of insulating flexible backing that supports a metallic foil pattern. When a specimen with
a strain gauge sensor is deformed, the metallic foil is deformed, causing its electrical resistance to change. The
strain is derived from the resistance changes measured using a Wheatstone bridge. The experimental setup for
measuring the strain field in the x-direction using a DIC device (GOM Aramis) is presented in Fig. 2d28. The
DIC technique measures the displacement and deformation of a specimen by using a digital camera. It involves
forming a random speckle pattern on the surface of a specimen, and comparing the images before and after the
deformation to derive the displacement, deformation, and strain. Pixel information with 256 Gray levels was
formed on the measured area of the specimen. A speckle pattern should be formed on the surface of an object
before deformation because the larger the contrast, the more accurate is the information contained in a unit
pixel. When the object is deformed, this pattern is deformed and the amount of deformation is measured in
pixels. A group of pixels forms a subset and acts as a hypothetical strain gauge. The DIC technique can be con-
sidered as the continuous measurement of a subset in a continuous image.
The experimental setup consisted of two upper displacement points moving in the vertical direction, and
two lower support points fixed on the table. Since the behavior of the specimen could not be simultaneously
measured using the strain gauge sensors and the DIC device, the positions of the upper displacement points
and lower support points were different in the experiments to measure the same deformation behavior in both
cases. Twelve strain gauge sensors were used, and 168 subsets were applied to the strain field measured using the
DIC device. The training, validation, and test datasets were created with a sampling rate of 5 Hz. Considering
the error of the experiment, a cyclic 4-point bending test was performed with five specimens for each specimen
type (healthy and damaged), and a dataset of 20,000 data was obtained.

Deep neural network (DNN) model. This section presents the machine learning process to predict the
strain field in real time using strain gauges based on the datasets obtained in the previous section.

Modelling the strain filed by DIC with PCA. Because of the high dimensionality of strain field data with 168
subsets (DIC generates 14 × 12 pixel image of strain field) , PCA is employed to reduce the dimensionality of the
strain field. PCA reduces the dimensions of a dataset consisting of a large number of interrelated variables while
maintaining the variation present in the dataset to the extent possible. This is achieved by converting a new set
of variables into ordered principal components such that the first few are uncorrelated and retain most of the
variations present in all original variables.
Out of 10,000 DIC images with 168 dimensions, we can construct a 10,000 × 168 strain matrix (denoted as
the X matrix), where each row represents a strain field at a given time and each column represents the strain
value according to time at a given subset. PCA is performed by employing the singular value decomposition

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Figure 2.  Experimental setup (a) Schematic of the specimen geometry and preparing process of the specimens,
(b) Cyclic 4-point bending, (c) strain measured with strain gauge sensors, (d) strain field measured with DIC
device.

(SVD) shown in Eq. (1); it is a real matrix factorization method similar to the reliable and robust orthogonal
matrix decomposition technique. Here, U and V are left and right singular vectors, respectively. All off-diagonal
elements of the  matrix are zero, and the diagonal elements are known as singular values σi of Eq. (2). The
 T  matrix contains the eigenvalues i of Eq. (3), which determines the variance explained for each principal
component. The V T matrix contains the principal components in the order in which the variance decreases. The
first n principal components (the singular value n) were retained and the rest were discarded. This is achieved
by projecting the data along the singular value of V T to obtain an n-dimensional representation of the strain
field. The singular value should be selected to approximately describe the X matrix. This can be determined by
examining the cumulative explained variance ratio as a function of the singular value defined in Eq. (4)29,30.

X = UV T (1)

� = diag(σ1 , σ2 , . . . , σ168 ) (2)

(σi )2 = i (3)

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Figure 3.  (a) Screen plot of PCA, i.e., cumulative explained variance ratio according to the number of
components, (b) comparison of actual strain and approximated strain, (c) comparison of actual strain field and
approximated strain field, (d) Y-position of maximum strain.

n
i
C.E.V .(n) = i=1
168 (4)
j=1 j

In Fig. 3a, the usage of singular values up to σ1, σ2, and σ8 (n = 1, 2, and 8) have cumulative explained variances
of 93%, 95%, and 97%, respectively. Figure 3b shows the strain measured at subsets 73, 79, and 84 in the speci-
men with an edge crack length of 15 mm for the three singular values. Although the difference in the cumulative
explained variance ratio was not large among them, significant error in strain estimation occurs at the pixels
closer the closer the crack. Figure 3c shows the actual strain field from DIC and approximated strain field in the
specimen with a crack length of 15 mm when the displacement load was 20 mm, which clearly shows that the
improvement of strain field estimation with more singular values. Because stress concentration occurred at the
crack tip, the position of maximum strain occurrence was considered as the crack tip. For precise crack locali-
zation, the position of maximum strain in the approximated strain field should correspond to the actual point
of maximum strain. Figure 3d shows a comparison of the actual points of maximum strain for five specimens
with a crack length of 15 mm and the approximated point of maximum strain for n = 2 and n = 8. The singular
value was selected as 8 because the position of occurrence of maximum strain and strain distribution in the
approximated strain field were close to the actual values. Thus, we converted the 168-dimensional strain field
image from the DIC into 8-principal component values which allows us to more efficient train a DNN model.

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Figure 4.  (a) Network structure and parameters of the DNN model, (b) curve of loss function during DNN
model training.

DNN model design and training. The DNN model was trained to predict eight principal component values with
local strains measured at 12 strain gauge sensors as inputs. The input and output features of the DNN model
were normalized using min-max normalization. The DNN model used in this study comprised an input layer,
three hidden layers, and an output layer (Fig. 4a). The neurons in two adjacent layers were fully connected. Each
connection was assigned a trainable weight multiplied by the input value. All hidden layers used the Leaky ReLU
activation function, followed by batch normalization. The weight and bias values (parameters) were initialized
using Xavier initialization. The mini-batch size was set to 50, and the number of epochs to 200. The Adam opti-
mizer was used to update the DNN parameters during backpropagation, and the initial learning rate was set
to 0.00131,32. Additionally, the learning rate was dropped 10 times every 50 epochs for fine tuning of the neural
network hidden layer. The loss function plays an important role in the construction of the DNN model and
improvement of its performance because it is an indicator of the difference between the actual and predicted val-
ues. We selected the weighted mean squared error loss functions based on the importance weighting in Eq. (4)33:
n 
 8
j
Weighted MSE = 168 (yi [j] − y
i [j])
2
(5)
i=1 j=1 k=1 k

In other words, the weighted mean squared error loss function trains the DNN model such that certain
components are more important than the rest by using the ratio of the eigenvalues that describe the explained
variance of each component. The experimental results of the three specimens for each specimen type were
used as the training/validation datasets (12,000), and those of the remaining two specimens as the test datasets
(8000). The splitting ratio for the training/validation dataset was set at 9:1. Figure 4b shows the convergence of
loss function over training and validation data.

Results and discussion

This section presents the performance of the proposed method for crack detection and localization.

Comparison of measurement results of strain gauge sensors and DIC device. Figure 5 shows the
local strain values measured from 12 strain gauge sensors at the maximum displacement load during the cyclic
loading tests for specimens with different crack lengths. The strain value (y-axis) corresponds to the averages
of the top 50 values for specimens with given crack length. The x-axis represents the crack length, and can be
regarded as the time axis through which the crack propagates if we presume to perform a fatigue test. The strain
in channel 5 was maintained at 0.5% when the crack length was 12 mm or less, and it was measured to be 0.8%
when the crack length was 15 mm. A sudden strain change in channel 5 of the strain gauge indicated that a crack
was detected nearby.
The strain of all channels, except channel 5, did not increase rapidly with the crack length. Because the stress
was concentrated at the crack tip, a sudden increase in the strain according to Hook’s law indicated that cracks
were detected. Considering the crack length and position of channel 5, it can be seen that the strain gauge sen-
sor can only detect cracks existing in an area within 7 mm, and it is difficult to accurately estimate the damage
localization such as crack position and crack length. It is possible to use a large number of strain gauge sensors
to estimate the crack localization, but this is impractical, as it requires significant effort and cost.
Figure 6a shows the strain field results measured using the DIC device for each crack length under the
maximum displacement load. Because we used 168 subsets for the DIC measurement owing to the data storage
problem, the subset size was 5 mm (length) × 5 mm (width). Therefore, the strain field was represented using
Delaunay ­triangulation34 with linear interpolation to accurately perform the crack detection and localization. A

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Figure 5.  Strain measured with strain gauge sensors according to crack length.

comparison of the strain fields with and without cracks shows that the strain concentration appears at the crack
length of 3 mm, and it occurs near the crack tip based on which the crack length can be estimated. Thus, it can
be seen that crack detection and localization are possible with the current DIC subset size for crack lengths of
3 mm or more.

Damage detection and localization. To examine the performance of the trained and validated DNN
model, we used 8000 test dataset that were not utilized in the training and validation processes. The DNN model
prediction in the 8-dimensional latent space was transformed back into a strain field. The predicted strain fields
were then compared with the actual strain field measured using a DIC device. The regression evaluation metrics
of R-squared value (R2), mean absolute error (MAE), and root mean squared error (RMSE) were used as the
DNN model performance ­metrics35. In addition, because the crack detection, position, and length can be pre-
dicted based on the position of maximum strain, the prediction accuracy for the position of maximum strain

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Figure 6.  Comparison of actual and predicted strain fields (a) actual strain field measured with DIC device, (b)
strain field predicted by the DNN model.

was also adopted as a DNN model performance metric. The performance results of the DNN model are listed
in Tables 1 and 2. In Table 1, R2, also known as the coefficient of determination, is an indicator of the extent to
which an independent variable (predicted value) explains the dependent variable (actual value) in a regression
model. In this study, R2 was 0.96, which means that the strain field predicted by the DNN model could explain
96% of the strain field measured using the DIC device. MAE assigns the same weight to the error in all cases by
calculating the average of the absolute values of the difference between the predicted and actual values. RMSE

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Metrics Value
R-squared ( R2) 0.96
RMSE 0.029
MAE 0.021

Table 1.  DNN model performance metrics.

Crack length (mm) Accuracy (%)

1 96.6
3 95.5
5 91.8
7 92.5
9 96.3
12 97.3
15 95.4

Table 2.  Accuracy of predicted position of maximum strain for each crack length.

is calculated as the square root of the average of the squares of all errors; thus, each error has a different weight.
Because the MAE is an intuitive indicator and the RMSE is an outlier-sensitive indicator, we examined these two
types of errors. Considering the typical strain gauge measurement error of 5% or less and the strain range meas-
ured in this study, the MAE and RMSE were within the measurement error range. Additionally, the predicted
position of maximum strain for each crack length matched the actual position by more than 90% from Table 2.
Thus, the DNN model could effectively predict the strain field measured with the DIC device.
Figure 6b shows the strain field predicted by the DNN model for each crack length under the maximum
displacement load. The strain field predicted by the DNN model was similar to that measured by the DIC device.
The strain field predicted from the DNN model is smoother than the original image from the DIC device because
the measurement noise was eliminated through PCA dimension reduction, which is beneficial in damage detec-
tion and localization.

Conclusion
We proposed a real-time crack monitoring method for a composite material by combining DNN with PCA and
SVD and predicting the strain field based on local strains measured using 12 strain gauge sensors. The feasibility
of the proposed method was demonstrated based on experimental data following the length of the edge crack
under the restriction of fixed crack position. When only 12 strain gauge sensors were used, crack detection was
impossible when the length of edge crack was 12 mm or less. However, when our proposed method was applied,
crack length of at least 3 mm could be detected, and the exact location and length of the detected cracks were also
accurately monitored. The proposed method can be extended to the application of various crack parameters such
as crack position, length, and inclination in the future. To accurately identify the crack detection and localization
in real time, a large number of strain gauge sensors are required, which necessitate a lot of effort and cost; so it
is difficult to apply. However, our proposed DNN based-SHM technique will contribute to strain-based SHM
of engineering structures such as aircrafts because it is possible to accurately identify the crack detection and
localization in real time through a small number of strain gauge sensors.

Data availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study available from the corresponding author on reason-
able request.

Received: 6 September 2022; Accepted: 14 November 2022

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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the AI Platform for Vision Systems and Applications Project (JA220002) of KITECH
and by the Education and Research promotion program of KOREATECH in 2022. J.L. and S.R. was supported
by the Basic Science Research Program (NRF-2022R1A2B5B02002365) and the National R&D Program (NRF-
2021M3E5E3080379) through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF).

Author contributions
J.Y. and G.K. devised and conducted the experiment. J.Y. and J.L. contributed in writing and running MATLAB
code for DNN model. J.P. and S.R. contributed in providing expertise and feedback with their experience. All
authors contributed in improving the manuscript with their experience and reviewing the manuscript several
times.

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Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.

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