Discrete Cosine Transformation and Temporal Adjacent Convolutional Neural Network-Based Remaining Useful Life Estimation of Bearings

In recent years, several time-frequency representation (TFR) and convolutional neural network- (CNN-) based approaches have been proposed to provide reliable remaining useful life (RUL) estimation for bearings. However, existing methods cannot tackle the spatiotemporal continuity between adjacent TFRs since temporal proposals are considered individually and their temporal dependencies are neglected. In allusion to this problem, a novel prognostic approach based on discrete cosine transformation (DCT) and temporal adjacent convolutional neural network (TACNN) is proposed. Wavelet transform (WT) is applied to effectively map the raw signals to the time frequency domain. Considering the high load and complexity of model computation, bilinear interpolation and DCT algorithm are introduced to convert TFRs into low-dimensional DCT spectrum coding matrix with strong sparsity. Furthermore, the TACNN model is proposed which is capable of learning discriminative features for temporal adjacent DCT spectrum coding matrix. Effectiveness of the proposed method is verified on the PRONOSTIA dataset, and experiment results show that the proposed model is able to realize automatic high-precision estimation of bearings RUL with high efficiency.