Intelligent Bearing Fault Diagnosis Based on Multivariate Symmetrized Dot Pattern and LEG Transformer

Deep learning based on vibration signal image representation has proven to be effective for the intelligent fault diagnosis of bearings. However, previous studies have focused primarily on dealing with single-channel vibration signal processing, which cannot guarantee the integrity of fault feature information. To obtain more abundant fault feature information, this paper proposes a multivariate vibration data image representation method, named the multivariate symmetrized dot pattern (M-SDP), by combining multivariate variational mode decomposition (MVMD) with symmetrized dot pattern (SDP). In M-SDP, the vibration signals of multiple sensors are simultaneously decomposed by MVMD to obtain the dominant subcomponents with physical meanings. Subsequently, the dominant subcomponents are mapped to different angles of the SDP image to generate the M-SDP image. Finally, the parameters of M-SDP are automatically determined based on the normalized cross-correlation coefficient (NCC) to maximize the difference between different bearing states. Moreover, to improve the diagnosis accuracy and model generalization performance, this paper introduces the local-to-global (LG) attention block and locally enhanced positional encoding (LePE) mechanism into a Swin Transformer to propose the LEG Transformer method. Then, a novel intelligent bearing fault diagnosis method based on M-SDP and the LEG Transformer is developed. The proposed method is validated with two experimental datasets and compared with some other methods. The experimental results indicate that the M-SDP method has improved diagnostic accuracy and stability compared with the original SDP, and the proposed LEG Transformer outperforms the typical Swin Transformer in recognition rate and convergence speed.