Few-Shot Cross-Bridge Damage Diagnosis from Vibration Sensor Signals via Siamese Contrastive Pretraining with...

Vibration sensor networks deployed on bridges continuously generate large volumes of unlabelled measurements under healthy operation, whereas labelled damage records on any specific target bridge remain extremely scarce-a chronic data asymmetry that constrains data-driven structural health monitoring (SHM). Existing remedies either require labelled source-bridge data or borrow augmentation pipelines and encoders from computer vision that are poorly matched to one-dimensional vibration signals. This study proposes a two-stage framework-siamese contrastive pretraining followed by few-shot fine-tuning on the target bridge-that learns environment-invariant representations from unlabelled source-side sensor signals and transfers them to a new bridge using only a handful of labelled samples. Three contributions are advanced: (i) a signal-domain augmentation policy that decouples sensor-level corruptions from operational-level fluctuations, including a frequency-band stochastic masking scheme designed to emulate cross-bridge perturbations; (ii) a one-dimensional self-calibrated convolutional encoder embedded in a stop-gradient siamese learner, providing the enlarged receptive field and inter-channel coupling required to capture sparse damage signatures in multi-sensor recordings; and (iii) a transferability analysis that formally links the contrastive invariance objective to a bound on the expected cross-bridge risk. On the Z24 benchmark and an in-house four-configuration laboratory bridge population, the method attains a 5-shot macro-F1 of 0.913 (Z24 → Lab) and 0.892 (Lab → Z24), outperforming eleven baselines by 3.4-37.1 percentage points.