A Lightweight Neural Network Based on GAF and ECA for Bearing Fault Diagnosis

A lightweight neural network fault diagnosis method based on Gramian angular field (GAF) feature map construction and efficient channel attention (ECA) optimization is presented herein to address the problem of the complex structure of traditional neural networks in bearing fault diagnosis. Firstly, a GAF is used to encode vibration signals into a temporal image. Secondly, the double-layer separation residual convolution neural network (DRCNN) is used to learn advanced features of the sample. The multi-branch structure is used as the receiving domain. ECA learns the correlation between feature channels. The extracted feature channels are adaptively weighted by adding a small additional computational cost. Finally, the method is tested and evaluated using wind turbine bearing data. The experimental results show that, compared with the traditional neural network, the DRCNN model based on GAF achieves higher diagnostic accuracy with less parameter calculation.