With the increasing complexity of mechanical equipment and diversification of deep learning models, vibration signals collected from such equipment are susceptible to noise interference. Moreover, traditional neural network models struggle to be effectively deployed in production environments with limited computational resources, severely impacting the accurate extraction and effective diagnosis of FK fault characteristics. In response to this challenge, this study proposes a fault diagnosis method for rolling bearings, integrating a lightweight ShuffleNetV2 network with variational mode decomposition (VMD) and the fast kurtogram (FK) algorithm. Initially, this paper introduces an enhanced FK method where the VMD algorithm is employed for data denoising, extracting FK post-denoising. These feature maps not only preserve critical signal information but also simplify data complexity. Subsequently, these feature maps are utilized to train and test the ShuffleNetV2 model, facilitating effective fault identification and classification. Ultimately, by conducting experimental comparisons with several mainstream lightweight network models, such as MobileNet and SqueezeNet, as well as traditional convolutional neural network models, this study validates the effectiveness of the proposed method in extracting fault characteristics from vibration signals, demonstrating superior diagnostic accuracy and computational efficiency. This provides a novel technical approach for health monitoring and fault diagnosis of industrial bearings and offers theoretical and experimental support for the deployment of lightweight networks in industrial applications.