A tractor transmission systems vibration fault data augmentation and diagnosis method based on DCGAN

The actual production process is often faced with insufficient fault data. Traditional data augmentation algorithms are prone to problems such as overfitting and pattern collapse. To address the issues, a tractor transmission systems vibration fault data augmentation and diagnosis method based on deep convolutional generative adversarial network is proposed. First, the original vibration signal is converted to a time–frequency diagram, which serves as the input to the generative adversarial network. Subsequently, the two timescale update rule strategy and gradient penalty are applied to stabilize the training process of the generative adversarial network, and the self-attention mechanism is introduced to enhance the feature extraction capability of the generative adversarial network. Furthermore, an enhanced AlexNet based on the convolutional block attention module is developed to improve the diagnostic performance. The approach was verified using datasets from Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), and a laboratory gearbox dataset. Results show 99% diagnostic accuracy for CWRU, over 97.5% for the laboratory dataset, and 98% accuracy under a single condition for the HUST gear dataset, with accuracy exceeding 95.3% under other conditions. This indicates that the method improves diagnostic precision and model generalization under data scarcity.