Connected Components-based Colour Image Representations of Vibrations for a Two-stage Fault Diagnosis of Roller Bearings Using Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract Roller bearing failure is one of the most common faults in rotating machines. Various techniques for bearing fault diagnosis based on faults feature extraction have been proposed. But feature extraction from fault signals requires expert prior information and human labour. Recently, deep learning algorithms have been applied extensively in the condition monitoring of rotating machines to learn features automatically from the input data. Given its robust performance in image recognition, the convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture has been widely used to learn automatically discriminative features from vibration images and classify health conditions. This paper proposes and evaluates a two-stage method RGBVI-CNN for roller bearings fault diagnosis. The first stage in the proposed method is to generate the RGB vibration images (RGBVIs) from the input vibration signals. To begin this process, first, the 1-D vibration signals were converted to 2-D grayscale vibration Images. Once the conversion was completed, the regions of interest (ROI) were found in the converted 2-D grayscale vibration images. Finally, to produce vibration images with more discriminative characteristics, an algorithm was applied to the 2-D grayscale vibration images to produce connected components-based RGB vibration images (RGBVIs) with sets of colours and texture features. In the second stage, with these RGBVIs a CNN-based architecture was employed to learn automatically features from the RGBVIs and to classify bearing health conditions. Two cases of fault classification of rolling element bearings are used to validate the proposed method. Experimental results of this investigation demonstrate that RGBVI-CNN can generate advantageous health condition features from bearing vibration signals and classify the health conditions under different working loads with high accuracy. Moreover, several classification models trained using RGBVI-CNN offered high performance in the testing results of the overall classification accuracy, precision, recall, and F-score.