A Novel Bearing Fault Diagnosis Method Based on Few-Shot Transfer Learning across Different Datasets

At present, the success of most intelligent fault diagnosis methods is heavily dependent on large datasets of artificial simulation faults (ASF), which have not been widely used in practice because it is often costly to obtain a large number of samples in reality. Fortunately, various faults can be easily simulated in the laboratory, and these simulated faults contain a lot of fault diagnosis knowledge. In this study, based on a Siamese network framework, we propose a bearing fault diagnosis based on few-shot transfer learning across different datasets (cross-machine), using the knowledge of ASF to diagnose bearings with natural faults (NF). First of all, the model obtains a good feature encoder in the source domain, then defines a fault support set for comparison, and finally adjusts the support set with a very small number of target domain samples to improve the fault diagnosis performance of the model. We carried out experimental verification from many aspects on the ASF and NF datasets provided by Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) and Paderborn University (PU). The results show that the proposed method can fully learn diagnostic knowledge in different ASF datasets and sample numbers, and effectively use this knowledge to accurately identify the health state of the NF bearing, which has strong generalization and robustness. Our method does not need second training, which may be more convenient in some practical applications. Finally, we also discuss the possible limitations of this method.