A spectrum-image based representation of machine vibration signals with deep convolution neural network is proposed for machine fault classification in which the convolution layer is used for automatic feature extraction as an alternate to the conventional feature-based methods. Two different forms of spectrum representations are proposed, one based on the short time Fourier transform of the original signals and the other based on the short time Fourier transform of the intrinsic mode functions acquired by empirical mode decomposition. Empirical mode decomposition has its own merits in discriminating non stationary signals and the novelty of the work is to use the short time Fourier transform of intrinsic mode functions with deep convolution neural network model. The classification and validation accuracy of the model are investigated with respect to epochs. It is demonstrated that both spectrum-based techniques perform good with 100% model accuracies in a numerical experiment of binary classification on a bearing dataset that comprises of normal and faulty signals. In another experiment using milling data set, short time Fourier transform of intrinsic mode functions representation performs better with 100% training accuracy, F1 score of 0.8933 which is better than that of using short time Fourier transform of raw signals whose training accuracy is 64% and F1 score of 0.7486. The numerical study shows that the empirical mode decomposition based spectrum representation delivers the highest accuracy in the learning model obviating the necessity for independent feature extraction, feature selection, and dimension reduction. The numerical experiment is extended using empirical mode decomposition based spectrums for multiple class classification problems in bearing dataset. The confusion matrix obtained for 10 classes, shows that validation accuracy is 100% for all classes. The performance comparison throws light on the merits of empirical mode decomposition spectrum method over other state of the art methods.