Graph Convolutional Network Based on CQT Spectrogram for Bearing Fault Diagnosis

Abstract

In this paper, a graph convolutional network is constructed and applied for bearing fault diagnosis. Specifically, the constant-Q transform (CQT) is first adopted for spectral analysis of vibration signals, where the frequencies are distributed in the logarithmic scale. Varied frequency resolutions can be obtained to satisfy the spectral resolution requirement and reduce signal dimension. Afterwards, the CQT spectrum is modeled by a graph, where nodes are frequency bins and edges reflect the inner relationship of different bins. There are edges between the fundamental and harmonic components. Then, a two-layer graph convolutional network (GCN) is utilized to assess the significance of vibration sources within the mixed signals. Finally, the bearing faults are determined according to the output of the GCN. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to model the vibration signal in this graph structure. The advantage of this approach lies in the simplification of edge definitions, facilitating shared connectivity relationships between the fundamental frequency and harmonics. Its performance was compared with another state-of-the-art fault diagnosis model. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model obtains higher accuracy, and it is more effective in extracting discriminative features.