A strong anti-noise and easily deployable bearing fault diagnosis model based on time–frequency dual-channel Transformer

Deep learning is widely used in Bearing Fault Diagnosis (BFD). Nonetheless, practical industrial production often generates a large amount of industrial noise. These noises exhibit randomness and complexity, which puts forward higher requirements for diagnosis algorithms. Certain studies have tackled the issue of anti-interference in high-noise environments (SNR≤0dB) by increasing the complexity of the model. However, due to the excessive number of parameters and computation, such models cannot be deployed on low-end edge devices. Balancing resource consumption and accuracy has become a major challenge in BFD modeling research. To solve the above problems, this paper proposes a new Transformer architecture model called LTFAFormer. The LTFAFormer is capable of achieving high-precision diagnostics on low-end edge devices and shows greater noise resistance. In terms of processing sequence information, Transformer has proven to be superior to other solutions. However, when dealing with longer sensor signal data containing complex noise, the traditional self-attention mechanism not only cannot effectively extract fault features, but also generates more computational complexity than CNN. To address this issue, we propose a novel time–frequency dual-channel parallel attention mechanism. Our approach enhances the feature extraction capability of the model by expanding the attention computation scale and reduces the computational resource consumption of the model by optimizing the model structure. To validate the effectiveness of LTFAFormer, we present two cases to demonstrate that LTFAFormer has higher prediction accuracy while satisfying lightweight. Especially in high-noise environments, LTFAFormer has stronger robustness. In this paper provides a new set of feasible strategies for the practical deployment of BFD models in practical industrial environments.