Detection and diagnosis of bearing faults using shift-invariant dictionary learning and hidden Markov model

Abstract Many existing signal processing methods usually select a predefined basis function in advance. This basis functions selection relies on a priori knowledge about the target signal, which is always infeasible in engineering applications. Dictionary learning method provides an ambitious direction to learn basis atoms from data itself with the objective of finding the underlying structure embedded in signal. As a special case of dictionary learning methods, shift-invariant dictionary learning (SIDL) reconstructs an input signal using basis atoms in all possible time shifts. The property of shift-invariance is very suitable to extract periodic impulses, which are typical symptom of mechanical fault signal. After learning basis atoms, a signal can be decomposed into a collection of latent components, each is reconstructed by one basis atom and its corresponding time-shifts. In this paper, SIDL method is introduced as an adaptive feature extraction technique. Then an effective approach based on SIDL and hidden Markov model (HMM) is addressed for machinery fault diagnosis. The SIDL-based feature extraction is applied to analyze both simulated and experiment signal with specific notch size. This experiment shows that SIDL can successfully extract double impulses in bearing signal. The second experiment presents an artificial fault experiment with different bearing fault type. Feature extraction based on SIDL method is performed on each signal, and then HMM is used to identify its fault type. This experiment results show that the proposed SIDL-HMM has a good performance in bearing fault diagnosis.