Fault diagnosis and severity analysis of rolling bearings using vibration image texture enhancement and multiclass support vector machines

Fault detection and diagnosis of its severity for machine health monitoring can be stated as a nested classification problem. For a faulty bearing, each fault location whether belonging to inner race, outer race or the ball can be seen as multiclass classification with three classes while the varying degree of severity in each class can be viewed as a sub classification task. The peculiar vibration patterns generated from the flaws in different bearing parts and with varying degree of distortion can be classified into various classes and subclasses for analysis of vibration signatures. This paper proposes a multiclass support vector machines (MSVMs) based fault classification approach for fault diagnosis of ball bearings. The one dimensional vibration signals are converted to two dimensional gray scale images resulting in textural patterns which are then enhanced using the wave atom transform. Features such as semivariance, skewness and entropy are extracted from the texture images and the MSVM is then trained using feature matrices generated from feature vectors. The MSVM is trained in two phases; in the first phase, the classifier categorizes the location of the fault and in the second phase the classifier does the diagnosis regarding the size of the fault at that particular location. Simulation results show that the proposed technique is highly robust in locating the fault and its severity.