Restricted Sparse Networks for Rolling Bearing Fault Diagnosis

The application of deep learning-based rolling bearing fault diagnosis methods in high reliability scenarios is limited due to low transparency. In addition, the scaling up of the deep learning models, in order to improve the performance of rolling bearing fault diagnosis (RBFD), has led to difficulties in its application in low-resource scenarios. Based on these facts, a new neural network, restricted sparse networks (RSNs), is proposed in this article. First, a restricted sparse frequency-domain space (RSFDS) is proposed for the interpretable representation of rolling bearing fault features (RBFFs) based on the quadratic complex domain equation. Second, an interpretable multichannel fusion mechanism is designed to map RBFFs to RSFDS. Furthermore, a high-power feature extraction module is developed to extract RBFFs in an efficient and easy-to-understand manner. Finally, an end-to-end RBFD network is provided for high reliability and resource-constrained scenarios. The experimental results show that RSNs have favorable fault diagnosis accuracy performance that is parallel to the state-of-the-art methods. More importantly, the model size of the proposed network only accounts for 20%–30% of the conventional methods.