Optimized Spectral Fault Receptive Fields for Diagnosis-Informed Prognosis
This work addresses fault diagnosis and prognosis in rotating machinery, offering an interpretable method for health monitoring applications, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing biological and optimization principles.
The paper tackles the problem of degradation state assessment and remaining useful life (RUL) estimation for bearing faults by introducing Spectral Fault Receptive Fields (SFRFs), a biologically inspired technique that enhances fault signature detection in vibration signals, achieving accurate RUL prediction on the XJTU-SY bearing dataset.
This paper introduces Spectral Fault Receptive Fields (SFRFs), a biologically inspired technique for degradation state assessment in bearing fault diagnosis and remaining useful life (RUL) estimation. Drawing on the center-surround organization of retinal ganglion cell receptive fields, we propose a frequency-domain feature extraction algorithm that enhances the detection of fault signatures in vibration signals. SFRFs are designed as antagonistic spectral filters centered on characteristic fault frequencies, with inhibitory surrounds that enable robust characterization of incipient faults under variable operating conditions. A multi-objective evolutionary optimization strategy based on NSGA-II algorithm is employed to tune the receptive field parameters by simultaneously minimizing RUL prediction error, maximizing feature monotonicity, and promoting smooth degradation trajectories. The method is demonstrated on the XJTU-SY bearing run-to-failure dataset, confirming its suitability for constructing condition indicators in health monitoring applications. Key contributions include: (i) the introduction of SFRFs, inspired by the biology of vision in the primate retina; (ii) an evolutionary optimization framework guided by condition monitoring and prognosis criteria; and (iii) experimental evidence supporting the detection of early-stage faults and their precursors. Furthermore, we confirm that our diagnosis-informed spectral representation achieves accurate RUL prediction using a bagging regressor. The results highlight the interpretability and principled design of SFRFs, bridging signal processing, biological sensing principles, and data-driven prognostics in rotating machinery.