An intelligent fault diagnosis method for rotor-bearing system using small labeled infrared thermal images and enhanced CNN transferred from CAE

Abstract

Despite deep learning models can largely release the pressure of manual feature engineering in intelligent fault diagnosis of rotor-bearing systems, their performance mostly depends on enough labeled samples constructed from the vibration signals. Acquiring lots of labeled samples is often laborious, and the vibration sensors tightly fixed on the equipment may influence their structures after long time running. To address these two problems, a new framework based on small labeled infrared thermal images and enhanced convolutional neural network (ECNN) transferred from convolutional auto-encoder (CAE) is proposed. First, infrared thermal images are measured to characterize various health states of rotor-bearing system. Second, exponential linear unit (ELU) and stochastic pooling (SP) are used to construct ECNN. Then, the model parameters of a CAE pre-trained with unlabeled thermal images are transferred to initialize the ECNN. Finally, small labeled thermal images are used for training ECNN to further adjust model parameters. The collected thermal images are used to test the diagnosis performance of the proposed method. The analysis and comparison results show that the proposed method outperforms the current mainstream methods.