The bridge influence line can effectively reflect its overall structural stiffness, and it has been used in the studies of safety assessment, model updating, and the dynamic weighing of bridges. To accurately obtain the influence line of a bridge, an Empirical and Variational Mixed Modal Decomposition (E-VMD) method is used to remove the dynamic component from the vehicle-induced deflection response of a bridge, which requires the preset fundamental frequency of the structure to be used as the cutoff frequency for the intrinsic modal decomposition operation. However, the true fundamental frequency is often obtained from the picker, and the testing process requires the interruption of traffic to carry out the mode decomposition. To realize the rapid testing of the influence lines of bridges, a new method of indirectly identifying the operational modal frequency and deflection influence lines of bridge structures from the axle dynamic response is proposed as an example of cable-stayed bridge structures. Based on the energy method, an analytical solution of the first-order frequency of vertical bending is obtained for a short-tower cable-stayed bridge, which can be used as the initial base frequency to roughly measure the deflection influence line of the cable-stayed bridge. The residual difference between the deflection response and the roughly measured influence line under the excitation of the vehicle is operated by Fast Fourier Transform, from which the operational fundamental frequency identification of the bridge is realized. Using the operational fundamental frequency as the cutoff frequency and comparing the influence-line identification equations, the empirical variational mixed modal decomposition, and the Tikhonov regularization to establish a more accurate identification of the deflection influence line, the deflection influence line is finally identified. The accuracy and practicality of the proposed method are verified by real cable-stayed bridge engineering cases. The results show that the relative error between the recognized bridge fundamental frequency and the measured fundamental frequency is 0.32%, and the relative error of the recognized deflection influence line is 0.83%. The identification value of the deflection influence line has a certain precision.
