A new dual-channel convolutional neural network and its application in rolling bearing fault diagnosis

Abstract Recently, deep learning has received widespread attention in the field of bearing fault diagnosis due to its powerful feature learning capability. However, when the actual working conditions are complex and variable, the fault information in a single domain is limited, making it difficult to achieve high accuracy. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes a bearing fault diagnosis method based on the Markov transition field, continuous wavelet transform (CWT), and dual-channel convolutional neural network (CNN). The method combines the descriptive ability of the Markov model for state transfer, the time-frequency analysis ability of CWT for signal, and the excellent performance of CNN with attention mechanism in feature extraction and classification. Specifically, we first propose a multi-channel Markov transition field method, which is combined with CWT to obtain two different representations of two-dimensional (2D) images. To comprehensively mine fault information, we further propose a dual-channel CNN with an attention mechanism. The design of this network structure aims to extract multi-level features from two types of 2D images. At the same time, we designed and embedded an attention mechanism to enable the network to focus more on extracting effective features, thereby improving the performance and accuracy of the network. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, three datasets were used for empirical research. The results show that this method exhibits superior performance in bearing fault diagnosis and has higher accuracy compared to traditional methods.