A Bearing Fault Diagnosis Method Using Multi-Branch Deep Neural Network

Feature extraction from a signal is the most important step in signal-based fault diagnosis. Deep learning or deep neural network (DNN) is an effective method to extract features from signals. In this paper, a novel vibration signal-based bearing fault diagnosis method using DNN is proposed. First, the measured vibration signals are transformed into a new data form called multiple-domain image-representation. By this transformation, the task of signal-based fault diagnosis is transferred into the task of image classification. After that, a DNN with a multi-branch structure is proposed to handle the multiple-domain image representation data. The multi-branch structure of the proposed DNN helps to extract features in multiple domains simultaneously, and to lead to better feature extraction. Better feature extraction leads to a better performance of fault diagnosis. The effectiveness of the proposed method was verified via the experiments conducted with actual bearing fault signals and its comparisons with well-established published methods.