Attention-based ConvNeXt with a parallel multiscale dilated convolution residual module for fault diagnosis of rotating machinery

Convolutional Neural Networks have promoted development of the fault diagnosis in the machine prognostics and health management. However, the existing methods have limited applicability under strong noisy conditions. We propose an attention-based ConvNeXt with a parallel multiscale dilated convolution residual module for the rotor fault diagnosis. The parallel multiscale dilated convolution residual module is firstly introduced to filter noise and extract multiscale discriminative features intelligently. The multi-head attention module is then embedded in ConvNeXt for global discriminative features adaptively. Focal Loss is finally implemented for identifying hard-to-classify samples to further improve the diagnostic accuracy. The application results demonstrate the superiority and robustness of our method in two case studies.