<p>Damage cases applied to the My Thuan bridge FEM.</p>

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 <b>near-real-time, online damage detection</b> in continuous bridge monitoring.</p></div>