Damage assessments of composite under the environment with strong noise based on synchrosqueezing wavelet transform and stack autoencoder algorithm

•Based on the synchrosqueezing wavelet transform, the strong noise of Lamb wave can be filtered out.•Based on SAE algorithm, damage location and quantitative identification are realized simultaneously.•Incorporates synchrosqueezing wavelet transform and SAE algorithm.•Five other intelligent methods are explored as comparisons.