“…More recently, deep learning (DL) characterized by multilayer neural networks (NN) (LeCun et al, 2015) has shown remarkable breakthroughs in pattern recognition for various fields including image classification (Rawat and Wang, 2017;Khan et al, 2022b,a), computer vision (Voulodimos et al, 2018;Roy and Bhaduri, 2021;Roy et al, 2022c;Roy and Bhaduri, 2022;Roy et al, 2022a), object detection (Zhao et al, 2019a;Chandio et al, 2022;Roy et al, 2022b;Singh et al, 2023a), brain-computer interfaces (Roy, 2022b,a,c;Singh et al, 2023b), signal classification Roy, 2023, 2022) and across diverse scientific disciplines (Bose and Roy, 2022;Roy and Bose, 2023b;Roy and Guha, 2022;Roy and Bose, 2023a;Roy and Guha, 2023). Following the success, there is an increasing thrust of research works geared towards damage classification tasks employing DL techniques, mostly convolutional neural networks (CNN), such as ResNet (Bang et al, 2018), AlexNet (Dorafshan et al, 2018;Li et al, 2018), VGG-net (Gopalakrishnan et al, 2017;Silva and Lucena, 2018) and various others (Chow et al, 2020;Nath et al, 2022;.…”