Reconstructing moving vehicle forces from structural responses is an important inverse problem in bridge engineering. When a sensor-network is applied to moving force identification (MFI), a necessary task is to specify the contribution of different sensors at the first beginning. This paper proposes a novel method based on the sparse self-estimated sensor-network for estimating moving vehicle forces on bridges. Firstly, an over-completed dictionary is pre-defined to ensure a sparse representation of moving vehicle forces. Images corresponding to force atoms, i.e. structural responses caused by unit force components, are used to match the structural responses. As a self-estimated sensor-network, the signal features, noise energy and signal-to-noise ratio of each sensor can be self-estimated by combining sparse regularization and Bayesian information criterion. Then an improved L 2 -norm regularization model, in which the cost function is defined by the weighted residuals of sensors, is proposed and applied to solve the MFI problem. Finally, both numerical and experimental examples are conducted to assess the accuracy and the feasibility of the proposed method. Illustrated results clearly show the robustness and applicability of the proposed method. Some related issues are discussed as well.