Abstract The rolling bearing is a critical component of mechanical equipment, and its failure can lead to serious consequences. In order to effectively extract fault features of rolling bearings and improve fault diagnosis performance, a fault diagnosis framework based on hierarchical multiscale dispersion entropy (HMDE) and improved histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) is proposed by combining entropy method with image recognition method. Firstly, the original vibration signal is subjected to moving average filtering to eliminate sudden noise and outliers. Then, HMDE is used for the extraction of fault features. HMDE can evaluate the complexity of the signal at different levels and scales, thereby extracting more comprehensive information. Based on HMDE, entropy color block (ECB) images are generated and the improved HOG of the images are extracted. Finally, Knearest neighbor (KNN) is used to classify the improved HOG features, completing the recognition of different working states of rolling bearings. The validity and robustness of the proposed fault diagnosis framework are proved by the verification experiments on the public bearing datasets in Case Western Reserve University and Southeast University.