Chen Zhihong, Du Yuan, Du Li
Accepted: 2026-03-13
Ensuring the structural integrity of bridge expansion joints is critical for maintaining traffic safety and prolonging infrastructure lifespan. However, conventional inspection methods are often labor-intensive, time-consuming, and disruptive to traffic flow. To overcome these limitations, this study proposes an edge–cloud collaborative acoustic monitoring system for the long-term health assessment of bridge expansion joints. Over an 18-month monitoring period spanning multiple bridges, approximately 21,000 acoustic signature samples of bridge expansion joints were collected. To ensure accuracy and reliability, all samples were meticulously annotated by experienced highway engineers. Based on this dataset, an adaptive edge–cloud collaborative classification framework was developed. Specifically, the edge device employs a cascade classification model based on Support Vector Machines (SVM) for real-time, lightweight inference, while the cloud leverages a deep learning model based on Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) to perform more complex analysis. The cascaded classification model deployed on the edge device achieved an accuracy of 96.7%, with a 95% confidence interval (CI) of (0.9632, 0.9668). In comparison, the GRU-based classifier running on the cloud attained a higher accuracy of 98.2%, with a 95% CI of (0.9783, 0.9823). Furthermore, the proposed adaptive two-stage classification strategy reduced data transmission to less than 5% of the total collected data. These experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system offers a reliable, efficient, and accurate solution for the acoustic health monitoring of bridge expansion joints.