Research on Fault Diagnosis of Rolling Bearing Based on Gramian Angular Field and Lightweight Model

Due to the limitations of deep learning models in processing one-dimensional signal feature extraction, and high model complexity leading to low training accuracy and large consumption of computing resources, this paper innovatively proposes a rolling bearing fault diagnosis method based on Gramian Angular Field (GAF) and enhanced lightweight residual network. Firstly, the one-dimensional signal is transformed into a two-dimensional GAF image, fully preserving the signal's temporal dependency. Secondly, to address the parameter redundancy and high computational complexity of the ResNet-18 model, its residual blocks are improved. The second convolutional layer in the downsampling residual blocks is removed, traditional convolutional layers are replaced with depthwise separable convolutions, and the lightweight Efficient Channel Attention (ECA) module is embedded after each residual block. This further enhances the model's ability to capture key features while maintaining low computational cost, resulting in a lightweight model referred to as E-ResNet13. Finally, the generated GAF feature maps are fed into the E-ResNet13 model for training, and through a global average pooling layer, they are mapped to a fully connected layer for classifying the faults of rolling bearings. Verifying the superiority of the proposed GAF-E-ResNet13 model, experimental results show that the GAF image encoding method achieves higher fault recognition accuracy compared to other encoding methods. Compared with other intelligent diagnosis methods, the E-ResNet13 model demonstrates strong diagnostic performance and generalization capability under both a single condition and complex varying conditions, fully proving the innovation and practicality of this method.