SpectralTCN: A multi-resolution wavelet gating network for vibration-based structural damage detection

Vibration-based structural health monitoring (SHM) detects damage by identifying subtle changes in a structure’s dynamic response. Deep learning models have shown strong potential for automating this classification task. However, most existing architectures share a key limitation: they either process signals purely in the time domain, or apply a global frequency-domain transform that discards information about when each frequency component occurs. This is a serious drawback, because structural damage typically manifests as short, localised events confined to specific frequency bands. This paper proposes SpectralTCN, a temporal convolutional network augmented with a Wavelet Gating Module (WGM) that performs learnable, data-dependent multi-resolution filtering within each convolutional block. The WGM decomposes intermediate features via the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) into physically interpretable sub-bands corresponding to distinct structural vibration modes, applies input-adaptive sigmoid gates independently at each decomposition level, and reconstructs the filtered signal via the Inverse DWT (IDWT) with a learnable residual connection initialised to zero. Unlike FFT-based approaches, the DWT simultaneously preserves both time and frequency information, enabling the network to detect both the timing and the spectral location of damage-induced anomalies. Combined with Generalized Mean (GeM) pooling and large-kernel causal depthwise convolutions, SpectralTCN is evaluated on two benchmark datasets: the Z24 Bridge benchmark and a finite element model (FEM)-derived dataset of the My Thuan cable-stayed bridge. Experiments against 10 baseline models and 4 ablation variants, evaluated via stratified 5-fold cross-validation, demonstrate the effectiveness and generalisation capability of the proposed approach: SpectralTCN attains the highest mean accuracy on both benchmarks (92.2% on Z24 and 92.1% on My Thuan) and outperforms the strongest baseline in the 5-fold cross-validation protocol. In addition, the proposed architecture operates on short, streaming acceleration windows with a purely convolutional backbone of moderate computational cost, making SpectralTCN suitable for near-real-time, online damage detection in continuous bridge monitoring.