Deep learning-based fault diagnosis of rolling bearings is a hot research topic, and a rapid and accurate diagnosis is important. In this paper, aiming at the vibration image samples of rolling bearing affected by strong noise, the convolutional neural network- (CNN-) and transfer learning- (TL-) based fault diagnosis method is proposed. Firstly, four kinds of vibration image generation method with different characteristics are put forward, and the corresponding pure vibration image samples are obtained according to the original data. Secondly, using CNN as the adaptive feature extraction and recognition model, the influences of main sensitive parameters of CNN on the network recognition effect are studied, such as learning rate, optimizer, and L1 regularization, and the best model is determined. In order to obtain the pretraining parameters, the training and fault classification test for different image samples are carried out, respectively. Thirdly, the Gaussian white noise with different levels is added to the original signals, and four kinds of noised vibration image samples are obtained. The previous pretrained model parameters are shared for the TL. Each kind of sample research compares the impact of thirteen data sharing schemes on the TL accuracy and efficiency, and finally, the test accuracy and time index are introduced to evaluate the model. The results show that, among the four kinds of image generation method, the classification performance of data obtained by empirical mode decomposition-pseudo-WignerâVille distribution (EP) is the best; when the signal to noise ratio (SNR) is 10âdB, the model test accuracy obtained by TL is 96.67% and the training time is 170.46âs.