Bridge Structural Health Monitoring: A Multi-Dimensional Taxonomy and Evaluation of Anomaly Detection Methods

Bridges are critical to national mobility and economic flow, making dependable structural health monitoring (SHM) systems essential for safety and durability. However, the SHM data quality is often affected by sensor faults, transmission noise, and environmental interference. To address these issues, anomaly detection methods are widely adopted. Despite their wide use and variety, there is a lack of systematic evaluation that comprehensively compares these techniques. Existing reviews are often constrained by limited scope, minimal comparative synthesis, and insufficient focus on real-time performance and multivariate analysis. Consequently, this systematic literature review (SLR) analyzes 36 peer-reviewed studies published between 2020 and 2025, sourced from eight reputable databases. Unlike prior reviews, this work presents a novel four-dimensional taxonomy covering real-time capability, multivariate support, analysis domain, and detection methods. Moreover, detection methods are further classified into three categories: distance-based, predictive, and image processing. A comparative evaluation of the reviewed detection methods is performed across five key dimensions: robustness, scalability, real-world deployment feasibility, interpretability, and data dependency. Findings reveal that image-processing methods are the most frequently applied (22 studies), providing high detection accuracy but facing scalability challenges due to computational intensity. Predictive models offer a trade-off between interpretability and performance, whereas distance-based methods remain less common due to their sensitivity to dimensionality and environmental factors. Notably, only 11 studies support real-time anomaly detection, and multivariate analysis is often overlooked. Moreover, time-domain signal processing dominates the field, while frequency and time-frequency domain methods remain rare despite their potential. Finally, this review highlights key challenges such as scalability, interpretability, robustness, and practicality of current models. Further research should focus on developing adaptive and interpretable anomaly detection frameworks that are efficient enough for real-world SHM deployment. These models should combine multi-modal strategies, handle uncertainty, and follow standardized evaluation protocols across varied monitoring environments.