494 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 62, NO.

1, JANUARY 2015

Vibration Spectrum Imaging: A Novel Bearing

Fault Classification Approach
Muhammad Amar, Student Member, IEEE, Iqbal Gondal, Member, IEEE, and
Campbell Wilson, Member, IEEE

Abstract—Incipient fault detection in low signal-to-noise

ratio (SNR) conditions requires robust features for accurate
condition-based machine health monitoring. Accurate fault
classification is positively linked to the quality of features
of the faults. Therefore, there is a need to enhance the
quality of the features before classification. This paper
presents a novel vibration spectrum imaging (VSI) feature
enhancement procedure for low SNR conditions. An artifi-
cial neural network (ANN) has been used as a fault classifier Fig. 1. Frequent fault-causing elements in a bearing, adapted from [2].
using these enhanced features of the faults. The normalized
amplitudes of spectral contents of the quasi-stationary time The overall fault classification problem can be classified
vibration signals are transformed into spectral images. A into two parts, feature selection and classifier design. In re-
2-D averaging filter and binary image conversion, with ap-
propriate threshold selection, are used to filter and enhance
cent years, several feature extraction techniques have been
the images for the training and testing of the ANN classifier. developed for rotary machine fault classification, using time,
The proposed novel VSI augments and provides the visual frequency, and multiresolution analysis (MRA) features [2]–
representation of the characteristic vibration spectral fea- [22]. These techniques perform well for a variety of problems
tures in an image form. This provides enhanced spectral and have certain advantages over others, depending upon the
images for ANN training and thus leads to a highly robust
fault classifier.
nature of the problem. Fourier transform (FT) has been among
the widely used feature extraction tools for machine health
Index Terms—Artificial neural networks (ANNs), bearing monitoring (MHM) applications [2], [5], [6], [23]. However,
fault, fault diagnosis, image processing, machine health
monitoring (MHM).
the FT-based method cannot localize the transients efficiently in
time; thus, short-time Fourier transform (STFT) is employed to
I. I NTRODUCTION localize the transients. The major concern with FT and STFT is
that the accuracy of extracting frequency information is limited

R OTARY machines are a vital part of our daily lives as

we rely on their flawless performance. Thus, the timely
and precise fault diagnosis of the machines is vital. Majority of
the faults in the motors (about 41% of the total faults) are due
to bearings [1]. Bearing faults, in motor driven systems, can
generate mechanical noise and degrade the quality of a product
line. In worst cases, it can even cause downtime for the entire
system, resulting in economic losses to the customers [2]. Faults
in the bearing are mostly due to the defects in the inner raceway,
outer raceway, or ball. These elements are illustrated in Fig. 1.
Vibrations are among the most widely used signals for the
detection of such type of faults because these signals are an
indicator for bearing defects, provided that a suitable processing
procedure is applied [3]. Many studies have used vibration sig-
nals for abnormality and fault detection [2], [4]–[8]. Thus, the
use of information-rich vibration signals for the fault detection
is a reasonable choice.
Manuscript received July 9, 2013; revised October 15, 2013,
January 20, 2014, and March 18, 2014; accepted April 26, 2014. Date of
publication May 30, 2014; date of current version December 19, 2014.
M. Amar and C. Wilson are with the Faculty of Information Technology,
Monash University, Clayton, Vic. 3800, Australia (e-mail: Muhammad.
amar@monash.edu).
I. Gondal is with Monash University, Clayton, Vic. 3800, Australia, and
also with Federation University, Ballarat, Vic. 3350, Australia.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIE.2014.2327555
0278-0046 © 2014 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
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by the length of the window relative to the duration of the fault
signature [15]. To overcome this hurdle, MRA [wavelet analysis
(WA)] or empirical mode decomposition (EMD) is used. With
the use of WA, the vibration signal can be decomposed into
series of wavelet components, each of which covers a specific
frequency subband called node [7], [16]. WA provides high
resolution both in time and frequency domains and can use the
infinite set of possible base functions [22]. EMD decomposes
a signal into many intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) [24], where
each IMF contains information about the original signal. EMD
is a good choice for nonlinear and nonstationary signals. Vibra-
tion signals keep changing their locations in the time domain
window because of unsynchronized window size with motor
periodic vibrations. A key drawback in wavelet and EMD is
the lack of a translation-invariant property in handling vibration
signals, thus making node and IMF contents time variant. The
application of wavelet transform (WT) to these time-invariant
vibration signals results in translation-variant contents in the
nodes; therefore, direct assessment from these contents often
turns out to be tedious or leads to inaccurate results [12]. Thus,
statistical features from WT node contents are calculated for
classification purposes [7], [12]. Statistical features for pattern
classification, calculated from WT nodes, contain the fraction
of the overall information in the signal nodes as most of the time
or multiresolution information of the signals is discarded. Loss
forfrom
more information.
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AMAR et al.: VIBRATION SPECTRUM IMAGING: NOVEL BEARING FAULT CLASSIFICATION APPROACH 495

of the information such as in [22] to check a certain threshold

value from node contents to generate a digital output worked
well, but in fault pattern classification for translation-variant
features, it has drawbacks. EMD, on the other hand, gives
decomposed IMFs which work well for nonstationary signals.
However, for fault pattern detection for translation-variant sig-
nals, EMD also requires the adaptive selection of relatively
important IMFs and feature extraction from these IMFs, while
Zhang et al. [24] use STFT for feature extraction from IMFs.
Both WT and EMD give decomposed signals which are sen-
sitive to the translation variance of vibrations because of the
unsynchronized window length and motor speed. In contrast,
FT has the advantage of directly representing time moving vi-
bration signals in the form of nonmoving, translation-invariant,
and equivalent spectral pattern. These translation-invariant pat-
terns can be processed and used as direct input to a classifier for Fig. 2. Flowchart of the algorithm.
training.
In the context of spectral features using FT, existing tech-
niques use a vibration snap shot/single time segment [23]
to calculate spectral features for diagnosis purposes. Because
of several internal and external noise sources [4], the quasi-
stationary nature of bearing vibrations [4], [6] and operating Fig. 3. Exemplary motor vibration spectral image.
condition variations can cause the single-time-segmented spec-
tral contents of a particular fault to appear different for different and robustness of the VSI features under different signal-to-
time segments. This gives an imprecise insight into the fault noise ratios (SNRs) have been used for performance evaluation.
contents in the spectrum. Therefore, instead of using a single- Results have shown that the proposed VSI, image processing,
time-segment spectrum, several-time-segment spectrums of vi- and ANN have surpassed existing solutions in classification
bration signals are used into a spectral image. This enables us to accuracy and robustness. Fig. 2 shows the framework for the
visualize the trend of spectral patterns, on a larger time scale as proposed method.
compared to a single time segment. The visualization of spec- The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section II
tral features in an image gives better understanding of faults describes the time segmentation and spectral imaging of the
and noise contents and helps in feature enhancement methods. vibration signal, Section III presents the feature enhancement
For this purpose, image processing has been introduced in this method, Section IV explains the ANN architecture and learning
paper to visualize and efficiently refine the spectral features by procedures, Section V discusses the experimental results, and
eliminating intermittent and insignificant frequencies of inco- Section VI concludes this paper.
herent noise, distributed over the entire spectral image using a
2-D averaging filter. These feature enhancements also help to II. T IME S EGMENTATION AND S PECTRAL I MAGING
ameliorate the suppressed frequency amplitudes of transients The proposed algorithm time-segments the input signal, as a
of vibrations caused by FT in extracting constituent frequency first step. The vibration signal for processing and information
information constrained by the relative length of the window. extraction is divided into time segments using a fixed rect-
The proposed vibration spectrum imaging (VSI) can enhance angular window of 1024 samples. The window size selection
features which can be used with an appropriate classifier for is discussed in Section V-B. These time-segmented vibration
fault detection. signals are then used to obtain spectral contents. For a signal X
K-means cluster, fuzzy classifier, support vector machine of length l with a window size of W samples, if U time segments
(SVM), Bayesian algorithms, and artificial neural network are combined to make a time-segmented image, then there are
(ANN) are among the widely used classifiers for MHM [6], m training set examples given by
[10], [12], [25]–[27]. Each of these classifiers has been used
m = ı/(W U ). (1)
successfully in MHM. The selection of an appropriate classifier
depends upon the nature and number of features and available With the W window size and U number of time segments
training data sets. ANNs are biologically inspired learning stacked in an image xi of a vibration signal X, it can be
processes and are used for applications such as in prognosis, represented by
classification, function approximation, and pattern recognition  
xi = Xui (w) ,
[10]. ANNs are known for their capabilities to learn a large
u = 1, 2, 3, . . . , U ; w = 1, 2, 3, . . . , W. (2)
number of features with nonlinear and complex patterns and
have been used for many MHM techniques [2], [5], [6], [8]– The spectral contents of each time segment adapted into an
[10], [20], [27]. Thus, in this paper, an ANN fault classifier image are then calculated and normalized to form a spectral
with a VSI image pattern has been used where each pixel of the image f ı using fast Fourier transform (FFT). An exemplary
image has been used as an input. The classification accuracy spectral image of motor vibrations is shown in Fig. 3.
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496
Fig. 4. Enhanced VSI of an exemplary motor vibration signal.
III. F EATURED I MAGE E NHANCEMENT
The grayscale spectral image obtained in the previous section
contains the information of characteristic frequencies of the
bearing health, as shown in Fig. 3. There are a few bright or
high amplitude vertical continuous spectral lines and a few
with lesser amplitude or brightness in the image. This image
is treated using the 2-D averaging filter (3) for feature enhance-
ment and noise mitigation
f dı = Avg_F ilter(f ı , Z).
In (3), Z is a matrix of (rows × columns) dimensions, with
each element of the matrix having a unit value. A new value
of any pixel p of the image is calculated by averaging rows
(number of vertical neighboring pixel amplitudes) and columns
(number of horizontal neighboring pixel amplitudes) by keep-
ing p in the center. The size of the matrix has both vertical and
horizontal averaging effects on the image, and its dimension
selection plays an important role in image enhancement under
low SNR. Using larger row and column values causes too much
augmentation of the features because of averaging; in contrast,
using smaller values achieves insignificant augmentation. The
selection of dimensions of Z and its effects on feature aug-
mentation will be discussed in Section V. Depending upon
the dimension of the Z matrix, the Avg_Filter does the 2-D
averaging, horizontal and vertical in the image. Thus, the filter
makes the continuous lines or coherent features prominent by
filling the missing values with the average and mitigating the
random dots and insignificant lines in the image by averaging
out the contents over the filter size. As a result, averaging
will enhance coherent or featured patterns and will depreci-
ate incoherent or noise spectral contents of Fig. 3 as shown
in Fig. 4.
These depreciated patterns or noise can be eliminated, and
augmented features can be retained by converting the grayscale
image into a binary one, using an appropriate threshold thr
f bı = Binary(f dı , thr).
The optimum binary thr is calculated using the thr cost
function

0 
n
Cost(thr) = (BIim − T Iim,db,thr ).
db=−d im=1
Here, d is the minimum decibel value for a particular
setup/experiment, n is the number of classes, BI is a baseline
image, and T I is a test image. Considering the BI images for
each class, (5) is used to calculate the cost of a particular thr
value. The thr value that minimizes the cost function over the
range of decibel values for a given number of classes is selected
as the optimum thr for binary conversion in (4).
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Fig. 5. VSI after binary conversion.
This binary conversion of any pixel value index by ind for
the f dı image works as
 
1 f dı (ind) ≥ thr
f bı (ind) = . (6)
0 f dı (ind) < thr
Both the Avg_F ilter and the binary thr help in retaining
featured patterns and removing the noise patterns. For this
purpose, the dimension of the filtration matrix Z and the thr
value are very important for spectral enhancement purpose.
(3) The optimal size of the filter and the thr value are explained
in detail in Section V. The binary-converted-spectral image of
the exemplary signal, using an appropriate threshold value, is
shown in Fig. 5. It can be seen that insignificant values are
filtered out from the image. This enhanced image is called
featured image and can be fed to the neural network to learn
the important features in this image for fault classification.
IV. ANN
ANN classifiers are a biologically inspired nonlinear empir-
ical model [6]. ANN design includes the input layer, hidden
layers, and output layer. The number of input layer neurons is
equal to the input features and the number of output neurons is
equal to the number of classes. There can be one or more than
one hidden layers with different numbers of neurons. Most of
the times, increasing the number of hidden layer neurons guar-
antees good learning, but it results in increased computational
cost. Therefore, the minimum number of the hidden layers
and neurons for certain classification accuracy is preferred.
Training of ANN can be supervised or unsupervised, depending
upon the nature of the problem [2], [9]. In this paper, we are
using supervised learning as, for each input feature pattern, we
have an associated target output. In this paper, input feature
patterns are spectral images, and targets are fault classes. Before
starting the training, the available data are divided into three
sets: training, validation, and testing. Mean square error (MSE)
is used to measure the accuracy of the training. The steepest
(4) descent method is used to adjust the weights and biases. The
next section will discuss the experimental setup and ANN
classification accuracy under different SNR conditions.
V. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS AND D ISCUSSION
(5)
A. Experimental Setup
Fig. 6 depicts the experimental setup for recording the
actual vibration data sets [28]. Experiments have been
conducted with four different bearings, including one normal
and three having faults in their inner race, ball, and outer
race. Bearing specifications are as follows (specified both
in inches and millimeters): inside diameter = 0.9843 in
(25.001 mm), outside diameter = 2.0472 in (51.999 mm),
AMAR et al.: VIBRATION SPECTRUM IMAGING: NOVEL BEARING FAULT CLASSIFICATION APPROACH 497

Fig. 6. Experimental setup adapted from [28].

thickness = 0.5906 in (15.001 mm), ball diameter =

0.3126 in (7.940 mm), and pitch diameter = 1.537 in
(39.040 mm). Drive-end (12 K) fault specifications: Inner Fig. 7. Spectral images of a normal and three fault signals at
raceway, outer raceway, and ball faults—all of these are 0-dB SNR.
of diameter = 0.007 in (0.178 mm) and depth = 0.011 in
(0.279 mm). Minimum available fault diameter of 0.007 in
(0.178 mm) has been used from 0.007 in (0.178 mm),
0.014 in (0.355 mm), 0.021 in (0.533 mm), and 0.028 in
(0.711 mm) to study incipient faults. Vibration signatures of
the faults, in its early stages, result in very poor SNR; thus, the
smallest available fault diameter with additive white Gaussian
noise (AWGN) has been used for poor SNR mimic incipient
fault [7]. Faults in the bearings are created by electrodischarge
machining. In the experiment, faulty bearings support the shaft
of the motor with a load of 2 hp at a speed of 1750 r/min.
The vibration data have been collected through accelerometers
using a 16-channel digital-audio-tape recorder and sampled at
the rate of 12 000 samples per second, giving us a 6000-Hz Fig. 8. Spectral images of a normal and three fault signals after
spectrum. Amar et al. [28] provide all possible available details averaging filter (8 × 4) at 0-dB SNR.
about bearings, faults, accelerometers, speed, and experimental
specifications. Vibration data, for certain bearing faults, can
also be generated using simulated models [29].

B. Spectral Imaging and Feature Enhancement

The recorded vibration data were converted into spectral
images. The 1750 r/min and 12 000 samples per second corre-
spond to a 412-sample length of window per cycle. Two cycle
lengths of vibration samples have been used to capture fault
information. The next nearest power of 2 for two cycles gives
us a 1024 window length. Keeping the window length relative
to the fault signature duration gives the augmented amplitude
calculation of spectral features [27].
Spectral images are of (8 × 513) size having 4104 elements,
with U = 8. This indicates that 8 consecutive time segment
spectral contents have been stacked to form an image with each
segment of 513 frequency indices in the image. In the high
SNR case, for noise mitigation, the number of time segments
stacked into an image does not matter because averaging has
insignificant effect, but a larger U will reduce the training
set size (1). In contrast, in low SNR, better noise mitigation
can be achieved using a larger number of stacked segments
because averaging depreciates the incoherent noise over the
filter dimensions. With a larger U value, better enhancement
of features can be achieved, but it results in a delayed and slow
diagnostic response. The limited size of available recorded data
also puts a limit on the stack size for reasonable training set
size (1). In this paper, images of (8 × 513) size have been used
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Fig. 9. Binary converted spectral images of a normal and three fault
signals with thr = 0.7 at 0-dB SNR.
to have a fairly large training set and feature augmentation at
the same time. The number of stacked segments into an image
and its effect on augmentation and computational time delays
are subjected to future studies. Fig. 7 shows spectral images of
four vibration signals named normal, inner-race fault, ball fault,
and outer-race fault at SNR = 0 dB.
These spectral images are processed by (3) with an averaging
filter of (8 × 4) and then converted to binary (4) with thr = 0.7
as shown in Figs. 8 and 9, respectively. The selection of (8 ×
4) filter size and thr = 0.7 is of major concerns in VSI and
is discussed later in detail. These obtained binary images are
feature images and are used to form a data set that will be used
for the training and testing of the ANN.
498
Fig. 10. Selection of minimum number of hidden layer neurons.
Fig. 11. Trained neural network architecture.
Fig. 12. Training curves of ANN.
C. ANN Training
The training set obtained from feature images with SNR =
0 dB contains spectral images with each image having
4104 frequency features. These 4104 features are the inputs,
and the four target classes are the output of the ANN. One
hidden layer with a different number of neurons has been in-
vestigated to achieve the best training with a minimum number
of neurons for faster computation. Three neurons in the hidden
layer gave the required accuracy with minimum computation as
shown in Fig. 10.
Experimentally recorded data set was divided into 896 (70%)
training, 192 (15%) validation, and 192 (15%) test sets after
random shuffling. Using feedforward and back propagation
algorithm, ANN has been trained for pattern classification. The
architecture of ANN is shown in Fig. 11. Fig. 12 shows the
training, validation, and testing curves of the ANN.
Our studies show that the best case achieved by the validation
and test sets gives very infinitesimal MSE, 3.2e−10 , implying
the accomplished generalized learning of the ANN for known
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Fig. 13. SNR = −10 dB spectral images.
Fig. 14. SNR = −15 dB spectral images.
and unknown patterns. After training, ANN was assessed with
different normal and abnormal vibration signals, and it was
able to classify fault signals into respective classes with 100%
accuracy with SNR = 0 dB.
D. Discussion on Filter Size and Binary Threshold Value
Selection With Different SNR Conditions
With SNR = 0 dB, ANN was able to classify the faults
efficiently. However, in an industrial environment, fault sig-
natures are contaminated with noise [7], and also, incipient
faults have very low SNR. Thus, the robustness of the VSI
is to be tested under different SNRs. AWGN has been added
with recorded vibration signals to achieve different SNR values
representing incipient fault conditions. In [7], the authors have
discussed the classification accuracy at an SNR of −10 dB,
as the worst case scenario, and have compared classification
results with existing techniques using the same experimental
setup for inchoate faults. In this paper, we will compare the
results with these established methods to prove the efficacy of
the proposed method. Figs. 13 and 14 show the spectral images
of four fault classes at SNR = −10 dB and SNR = −15 dB.
In these cases, SNR is so low that it is hard even to see the
straight lines suppressed under noise in the spectral images as
compared to Fig. 7 at SNR = 0 dB. As mentioned previously,
the (8 × 4) filter size and thr = 0.7 are the optimized values
in this approach, and thus, we will first discuss the averaging
filter and its size effects and then the thr value to enhance these
spectral images.
1) Averaging Filter Size: Fig. 15 shows the enhanced
spectral images of Fig. 13, with the (8 × 4) averaging filter.
AMAR et al.: VIBRATION SPECTRUM IMAGING: NOVEL BEARING FAULT CLASSIFICATION APPROACH
Fig. 15. Enhanced spectral images with averaging filter of (8 × 4) at
SNR = −10 dB.
Fig. 16. Enhanced image of −10-dB SNR with averaging filter of
(8 × 4) converted to binary image with thr = 0.7.
Fig. 17. Binary image with thr = 0.7 without averaging filter.
Then, Fig. 16 shows the binary converted spectral images of
Fig. 15 using thr = 0.7. Fig. 17 shows the binary converted
spectral images of Fig. 13 with the same threshold thr =
0.7 without applying the averaging filter. Now, by looking at
Figs. 16 and 17, it is clear that the averaging filter enhances
the image by brightening the fault signature features and by
mitigating the noise of the spectral images.
Let us discuss the dimensions of the filter size. Figs. 18–22
show the binary converted images processed with different
averaging filter sizes. The averaging filter is a 2-D filter with
both horizontal and vertical effects on the image.
1) With a larger column value, a larger number of adjacent
frequencies in the spectrum will be affected by the av-
eraging as shown in Fig. 22. Thus, a maximum column
value that avoids the merging of the adjacent frequencies
is preferred, and that value is 4 in this case.
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499
Fig. 18. thr = 0.7, SNR = −10 dB, and Z dimensions = (2 × 2).
Fig. 19. thr = 0.7, SNR = −10 dB, and Z dimensions = (4 × 4).
Fig. 20. thr = 0.7, SNR = −10 dB, and Z dimensions = (8 × 8).
2) The row value has effects on filling the missing values
among the stacked segments and mitigating the noise.
With a larger row value, the missing value can be better
estimated, and larger reduction in noise can be achieved.
However, a larger row value truncates the featured image
from top and bottom as shown in Fig. 21. Smaller row
values do not estimate the missing values accurately as
shown in Fig. 18. Therefore, a compromised row value
is required which gives us optimum results, and that
value is 8.
Thus, comparing Figs. 18–22 with Fig. 16, it is evident that,
with the averaging filter of (8 × 4), we get better enhancement
of features and noise mitigation.
2) Binary Threshold Value: After determining the size of
the averaging filter, now, we will discuss about the threshold
value for binary conversion. Figs. 23 and 24 show the effects of
the threshold values of thr = 0.5 and thr = 0.9 with the use
500
Fig. 21. thr = 0.7, SNR −10 dB, and Z dimensions = (16 × 16).
Fig. 22. thr = 0.7, SNR = −10 dB, and Z dimensions = (16 × 4).
Fig. 23. thr = 0.9, SNR = −10 dB, and Z dimensions = (8 × 4).
of the averaging filter of size (8 × 4). Comparing these figures
with Fig. 16, it is clear that using a higher thr value results in
the loss of features and a lesser thr value results in inefficient
noise removal. After a number of studies using different thr
values, it was found that thr = 0.7 is a better choice for binary
conversion.
A visually inspected optimized thr = 0.7 value can be con-
firmed by (5). The plot of the cost function in (5) over the thr
range of 0–1 with n = 4 and d = 12 is shown in Fig. 25 using
baseline images of four classes with the averaging filter of (8 ×
4). It is evident from the plot that the cost function minimizes
at the thr = 0.7 value.
Fig. 25 indicates that 0.7 minimizes the cost function. The
cost of the function is high before and after thr = 0.7. Costs
at thr values lesser than 0.7 point toward excessive noise in
the images, and costs at values greater than 0.7 indicate poor
fault features. Thus, binary conversion with thr = 0.7 is the
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Fig. 24. thr = 0.5, SNR = −10 dB, and Z dimensions = (8 × 4).
Fig. 25. Binary threshold value selection.
optimum choice to remove the noise under poor SNR and still
ensures good classification by retaining the spectral features.
3) Costs Associated With Average Filtering and Binary
Threshold: There are two noise sources in the spectral images:
intentionally added AWGN and processing noise. Processing
noise is the error caused by different enhancement procedures
in the spectral images. The total noise or error cost associated
with the test image relative to the baseline image can be studied
by modifying (5) into (7)

( nim=1 abc(BIim − T Iim ))
Cost(db) = . (7)
N orm
N orm is the normalization factor and is equal to the product
of the number of image pixels and the number of classes. If
we have a white test image and a black baseline image or
vice versa, then (7) will give us the cost of 1, which is the
maximum possible error or cost. As similarity between baseline
and test images increases, the cost value decreases. Therefore,
the cost of 1 corresponds to maximum dissimilarity, and that of
0 corresponds to maximum similarity, indicating the absence of
AWGN and processing noise. If we know the cost of AWGN,
then the scale of 0 to 1 can be used to estimate the processing
noise caused by image enhancement procedures for a spectral
image at any given SNR. Fig. 26 shows the error curves of
different image enhancement procedures in comparison to no-
enhancement reference curve, i.e., AWGN only at any SNR
level.
AMAR et al.: VIBRATION SPECTRUM IMAGING: NOVEL BEARING FAULT CLASSIFICATION APPROACH 501

TABLE I
C LASSIFICATION ACCURACY W ITH SNR

Fig. 26. Comparison of error caused by different image enhancement

schemes.

Comparative results are presented in Fig. 26 in the form of

four error curves. These curves are no-enhancement (AWGN
only), averaging filter (AWGN and processing noise of the aver-
aging filter), binary threshold (AWGN and processing noise of
binary conversion), and combination of both the averaging filter
and binary threshold (AWGN and processing noise caused by Fig. 27. Confusion matrix of VSI-based ANN at −10 dB.
both the averaging filter and binary conversion). The increased
TABLE II
cost/error level shown by the averaging filter curve over the C LASSIFICATION C OMPARISON OF VSI AT SNR = −10 dB
no-enhancement curve indicates that, to achieve feature aug- W ITH T HAT IN [7]
mentation and missing values, the averaging filter introduces
noise in the image; thus, the total cost goes well above the
reference. This augmentation and increased noise can be seen
in Figs. 7 and 8. In contrast, the binary threshold curve always
stays below the reference, indicating noise mitigation, and is
vivid in Fig. 9 when compared with Figs. 7 and 8. This can be
interpreted as that the averaging filter increases the noise level
to achieve content augmentation while the binary conversion
mitigates noise but achieves no feature augmentation; thus, the
combination of both should provide better enhancement by
providing augmentation and noise mitigation in the images. probability), and this can be calculated from the confusion
Fig. 26 shows that the curve with the combination of both matrix, shown in Fig. 27, by considering the number of true
the averaging filter and binary threshold minimizes the cost in positives, false positives, false negatives, and true negatives.
comparison to all other curves. The averaging filter achieved For better fault classification, the high hit and low false alarm
feature augmentation but increased the total noise which was probabilities are preferred, and for a perfect classifier, these
then mitigated by binary threshold and thus resulted in better probabilities will be 1 and 0, respectively [30]. For the four
feature enhancement. classes, from the confusion matrix (see Fig. 27), the hit and
false alarm probability pairs are (1, 0), (0.87, 0), (1, 0), and
(1, 0.04), respectively. The overall hit and false alarm proba-
E. Classification Accuracy
bilities of the classifier are 0.96 and 0.01, respectively. High
Now, we will discuss the classification accuracy of the hit probability (0.96) and low false alarm probability (0.01)
trained ANN under different SNR conditions to validate the indicate that VSI with ANN is capable to distinguish different
robustness of the VSI-based ANN classifier. Table I shows classes accurately, showing very high correct detection percent-
the classification accuracy of the VSI with the SNR varying age with very low false alarms even under poor SNR.
from 0 dB to −15 dB. Results show that VSI is capable to have Table II shows the comparison of well-established techniques
higher classification accuracy even under adverse conditions. for classification accuracies mentioned in [7] in the worst case
Fig. 27 shows the confusion matrix of VSI with ANN at scenario of SNR = −10 dB for inchoate/incipient faults.
−10 dB. The classifier has achieved overall very high (96.9%) Table II indicates that the accuracy of VSI with ANN sur-
classification accuracy. To investigate how good the classifier passes the existing best case techniques by 5.67% at SNR =
has learned about different classes, we need to determine the hit −10 dB. Even, according to Tables I and II, VSI at SNR =
and false alarm probability pair (hit probability and false alarm −12 dB outperforms that in [7] at SNR = −10 dB.
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502 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 62, NO. 1, JANUARY 2015
To validate the robustness of the VSI features, ANN was
trained with WT features proposed in [7] for comparison. These
features gave 100% accuracy at 0 dB with high hit probability
and low false alarm probability, but at −10 dB, it had an overall
hit probability of 0.38 and a false alarm probability of 0.15. This
indicates that these features are not performing well and are
unable to discriminate among different classes with ANN under
poor SNR and hints that VSI features are robust when used with
ANN even under poor SNR in contrast to the features in [7].
The translation-invariant nature of FT spectral contents, in
contrast to WT, and image processing, with visual aid for
feature enhancement, has helped to increase the classification
accuracy under low SNR. The averaging filter size and binary
threshold value are very crucial parameters for this reliable
fault classification. The 2-D averaging filter simultaneously
mitigates the incoherent noise and augments the coherent fault
features even under low SNR. Applying an appropriate binary
threshold removes the mitigated noise and keeps the augmented
fault signatures and thus provides feature enhancement that
helps to achieve improved classification accuracy.
VI. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, VSI and ANN-based bearing fault classification
into the inner race, outer race, and ball faults against the
usual behavior has been presented. The spectral contents of
the translation-variant time-segmented vibration signal, trans-
formed into a spectral image, have been processed for feature
enhancement using the 2-D averaging filter and grayscale to
binary image conversion. These enhanced featured images are
then used to train the ANN classifier. Results have shown that
ANN with VSI has learned the complex known and unknown
patterns with 96.90% accuracy, outperforming the existing
techniques by 5.67% at the worst case of SNR = −10 dB.
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Authors’ photographs and biographies not available at the time of
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