A Multi-Scale Self-Supervision Approach for Bearing Anomaly Detection Using Sensor Data Under Multiple Operating Conditions

Early fault detection technologies play a decisive role in preventing equipment failures in industrial production. The primary challenges in early fault detection for industrial applications include the severe imbalance of time-series data, where normal operating data vastly outnumber anomalous data, and in some cases, anomalies may be virtually absent. Additionally, the frequent changes in operational modes during machinery operation further complicate the detection process, making it difficult to effectively identify faults across varying conditions. This study proposes a bearing early anomaly detection method based on contrastive learning and reconstruction approaches to address the aforementioned issues. The raw time-domain vibration data, which were collected from sensors mounted on the bearings of the machinery, are first preprocessed using the Ricker wavelet transform to effectively remove noise and extract useful signal components. These processed signals are then fed into a BYOL-based contrastive learning network to learn more discriminative global feature representations. In addition, we design the reconstruction loss to complement contrastive learning. By reconstructing the masked original data, the reconstruction loss forces the model to learn detailed information, thereby emphasizing the preservation and restoration of local details. Our model not only eliminates the reliance on negative samples found in mainstream unsupervised methods but also captures data features more comprehensively, achieving superior fault detection accuracy under different operating conditions compared to related methods. Experiments on the widely used CWRU multi-condition-bearing fault dataset demonstrate that our method achieves an average fault detection accuracy of 96.97%. Moreover, the experimental results show that on the full-cycle IMS dataset, our method detects early faults at least 2.3 h earlier than the other unsupervised methods. Furthermore, the validation results for the full-cycle XJTU-SY dataset further demonstrate its excellent generalization ability.