Aiming at the problem of on-line damage diagnosis in structural health monitoring （SHM）, an algorithm of feature extraction and damage alarming based on auto-regressive moving-average （ARMA） time series analysis is presented. The monitoring data were first modeled as ARMA models, while a principalcomponent matrix derived from the AR coefficients of these models was utilized to establish the Mahalanobisdistance criterion functions. Then, a new damage-sensitive feature index DDSF is proposed. A hypothesis test involving the t-test method is further applied to obtain a decision of damage alarming as the mean value of DDSF had significantly changed after damage. The numerical results of a three-span-girder model shows that the defined index is sensitive to subtle structural damage, and the proposed algorithm can be applied to the on-line damage alarming in SHM.
