Online Signal Denoising Using Adaptive Stochastic Resonance in Parallel Array and Its Application to Acoustic Emission Signals

Signal denoising has been significantly explored in various engineering disciplines. In particular, structural health monitoring applications generally aim to detect weak anomaly responses (including acoustic emission (AE)) generated by incipient damage, which are easily buried in noise. Among various approaches, stochastic resonance (SR) has been widely adopted for weak signal detection. While many advancements have been focused on identifying useful information from the frequency domain by optimizing parameters in a post-processing environment to activate SR, it often requires detailed information about the original signal a priori, which is hardly assessed from signals overwhelmed by noise. This research presents a novel online signal denoising strategy by utilizing SR in a parallel array of bistable systems. The original noisy input with additionally applied noise is adaptively scaled, so that the total noise level matches the optimal level that is analytically predicted from a generalized model to robustly enhance signal denoising performance for a wide range of input amplitudes that are often not known in advance. Thus, without sophisticated post-processing procedures, the scaling factor is straightforwardly determined by the analytically estimated optimal noise level and the ambient noise level, which is one of the few quantities that can be reliably assessed from noisy signals in practice. Along with numerical investigations that demonstrate the operational principle and the effectiveness of the proposed strategy, experimental validation of denoising AE signals by employing a bistable Duffing circuit system exemplifies the promising potential of implementing the new approach for enhancing online signal denoising in practice.