This paper presents a novel method for fusing information from multiple sensor systems for bearing fault diagnosis. In the proposed method, a convolutional neural network is exploited to handle multiple signal sources simultaneously. The most important finding of this paper is that a deep neural network with wide structure can extract automatically and efficiently discriminant features from multiple sensor signals simultaneously. The feature fusion process is integrated into the deep neural network as a layer of that network. Compared to single sensor cases and other fusion techniques, the proposed method achieves superior performance in experiments with actual bearing data.
Keywords: bearing fault diagnosis; deep learning; deep neural network; sensor fusion.