Anomaly detection for construction vibration signals using unsupervised deep learning and cloud computing

In-operation construction vibration monitoring records inevitably contain various anomalies caused by sensor faults, system errors, or environmental influence. An accurate and efficient anomaly detection technique is essential for vibration impact assessment. Identifying anomalies using visualization tools is computationally expensive, time-consuming, and labor-intensive. In this study, an unsupervised approach for detecting anomalies in construction vibration monitoring data was proposed based on a temporal convolutional network and autoencoder. The anomalies were autonomously detected on the basis of the reconstruction errors between the original and reconstructed signals. Considering the false and missed detections caused by great variability in vibration signals, an adaptive threshold method was applied to achieve the best identification performance. This method used the log-likelihood of the reconstruction errors to search for an optimal coefficient for anomalies. A distributed training strategy was implemented on a cloud platform to speed up training and perform anomaly detection without significant time delay. Construction-induced accelerations measured by a real vibration monitoring system were used to evaluate the proposed method. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can successfully detect anomalies with high accuracy; and the distributed training can remarkably save training time, thereby realizing anomaly detection for online monitoring systems with accumulated massive data.