Toward End-to-End Bearing Fault Diagnosis for Industrial Scenarios with Spiking Neural Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces MRA-SNN, a novel spiking neural network architecture that improves bearing fault diagnosis by enhancing feature extraction, robustness, and efficiency, enabling practical industrial deployment.

Contribution

The paper proposes a multi-scale residual attention SNN with a new encoding scheme and attention mechanisms, advancing end-to-end fault diagnosis without complex preprocessing.

Findings

Outperforms existing methods in accuracy, energy efficiency, and noise robustness.

Effective in real-world industrial scenarios across multiple benchmark datasets.

Reduces preprocessing complexity with multiscale attention encoding.

Abstract

This paper explores the application of spiking neural networks (SNNs), known for their low-power binary spikes, to bearing fault diagnosis, bridging the gap between high-performance AI algorithms and real-world industrial scenarios. In particular, we identify two key limitations of existing SNN fault diagnosis methods: inadequate encoding capacity that necessitates cumbersome data preprocessing, and non-spike-oriented architectures that constrain the performance of SNNs. To alleviate these problems, we propose a Multi-scale Residual Attention SNN (MRA-SNN) to simultaneously improve the efficiency, performance, and robustness of SNN methods. By incorporating a lightweight attention mechanism, we have designed a multi-scale attention encoding module to extract multiscale fault features from vibration signals and encode them as spatio-temporal spikes, eliminating the need for complicated preprocessing. Then, the spike residual attention block extracts high-dimensional fault features and enhances the expressiveness of sparse spikes with the attention mechanism for end-to-end diagnosis. In addition, the performance and robustness of MRA-SNN is further enhanced by introducing the lightweight attention mechanism within the spiking neurons to simulate the biological dendritic filtering effect. Extensive experiments on MFPT, JNU, Bearing, and Gearbox benchmark datasets demonstrate that MRA-SNN significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of accuracy, energy consumption, and noise robustness, and is more feasible for deployment in real-world industrial scenarios.