Few-Shot Learning for Full Ceramic Bearing Fault Diagnosis with Acoustic Emission Signals

Abstract

Full ceramic bearings are critical components in many full ceramic and oil-free food processing and medical equipment. Developing effective full ceramic fault diagnostic methods is important. Supervised deep learning approaches have been considered promising for fault diagnosis in the era of big data where abundantly labelled datasets are available. However, in many industrial applications, datasets with fault labels are rare. This challenge has motivated the task for developing deep learning approaches for fault diagnosis with few training examples. To meet the challenge, one attractive direction is to use available pre-trained deep learning architectures to do fault diagnosis with only few examples. Specifically, this paper investigates the effectiveness of using pre-trained deep learning architectures successfully used in natural language processing to achieve few-shot learning for full ceramic bearing fault diagnosis using acoustic emission signals.