An intelligent fault severity detection method based on variational mode decomposition- (VMD-) Wigner-Ville distribution (WVD) and sparrow search algorithm- (SSA-) optimized deep belief network (DBN) is suggested to address the problem that typical fault diagnostic algorithms are inappropriate for extremely comparable vibration signals when the samples are insufficient. VMD is used to process the original vibration signal to obtain the band intrinsic mode functions (BIMFs) with different frequencies. WVD produces the two-dimensional spectrum of the key BIMF with the highest variance contribution rate. The input sample of DBN is composed of a characteristic matrix formed by the two-dimensional spectrum of multiple fault signals. DBN’s learning rate and batch size are both tuned globally by SSA, which has a significant influence on network error. The fitness function in the parameter optimization process is the network’s root mean square error (RMSE). Finally, the input samples are loaded into a DBN that has the best structure for detecting severity. Experiments show that, based on VMD-WVD and SSA-DBN, accuracy of the fault severity detection model for rotating machines, which has good generalization ability and robustness, can reach 98%. Compared with BPNN, the traditional DBN, VMD-DBN, VMD-PSO-DBN, and other methods, the proposed algorithm has strong adaptive feature extraction ability and generalization of application.