A transfer learning model for rolling bearing fault diagnosis based on texture loss strategy and nuclear norm regularization

Abstract In recent years, transfer learning (TL) approaches have seen extensive application in diagnosing bearing faults due to their exceptional performance. However, mechanical noise, equipment aging, and wear lead to notable disparities and differences in the multi-level feature distributions across the source and target domain signals. The issue is addressed by proposing a TL model based on a texture loss strategy and nuclear norm regularization method. First, a feature-enhanced network is designed, which significantly improves the ability to capture local details and long-range dependencies by combining a multi-scale feature extraction module with a dilated residual module. Next, a texture loss strategy is proposed to align multi-scale features across domains by minimizing the Gram matrix of signal features. Finally, a nuclear norm regularization method is proposed to perform low-rank approximation on the signal matrix, facilitating the extraction of more robust feature data and mitigating the risk of overfitting. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieved an average accuracy of 98.58% on the University of Ottawa bearing fault dataset and 98.11% on the Jiangnan University bearing dataset, surpassing eight other algorithms in bearing fault diagnosis.