Bearing fault diagnosis method for unbalance data based on Gramian angular field

In the application of deep learning-based fault diagnosis, more often than not, the network model could perform better with a balanced dataset input, whereby the number of fault data is equivalent to that of normal data. However, in the context of real-world applications, the number of fault data is generally insufficient compared to the normal data. In this study, a new approach for fault diagnosis in unbalanced data sets is proposed using the Gramian angular field (GAF) method. Firstly, the GAF method is employed to convert one-dimensional data into two-dimensional data, which enhances the feature extraction process. Secondly, to balance the sample distribution, fault data is generated using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Finally, the Residual neural network (ResNet) with an attention mechanism is utilized to improve the accuracy of fault diagnosis. The proposed method is experimentally validated using open-source bearing datasets that are published by Case Western Reserve University and the University of Ottawa. The experimental results show that the proposed method has greatly improved fault diagnosis performance in cases of data distribution imbalance, surpassing that of the compared methods.