A Lightweight Model for Bearing Fault Diagnosis Based on Gramian Angular Field and Coordinate Attention

The key to ensuring rotating machinery’s safe and reliable operation is efficient and accurate faults diagnosis. Intelligent fault diagnosis technology based on deep learning (DL) has gained increasing attention. A critical challenge is how to embed the characteristics of time series into DL to obtain stable features that correlate with equipment conditions. This study proposes a lightweight rolling bearing fault diagnosis method based on Gramian angular field (GAF) and coordinated attention (CA) to improve rolling bearing recognition performance and diagnosis efficiency. Firstly, the time domain signal is encoded into GAF images after downsampling and segmentation. This method retains the temporal relation of the time series and provides valuable features for DL. Secondly, a lightweight convolution neural network (CNN) model is constructed through depthwise separable convolution, inverse residual block, and linear bottleneck layer to learn advanced features. After that, CA is employed to capture the long-range dependencies and identify the precise position information of the GAF images with nearly no additional computational overhead. The proposed method is tested and evaluated by CWRU bearing dataset and experimental dataset. The results demonstrate that the CNN based on GAF and CA (GAF-CA-CNN) model can effectively reduce the calculation overhead of the model and achieve high diagnostic accuracy.