Using vibration signals for bearing fault diagnosis can generally achieve good diagnostic results. However, it is not suitable for practical industrial applications due to the restricted installation and high cost of vibration sensors. Therefore, the easily obtainable motor current signal (MCS) has received widespread attention in recent years. Meanwhile, traditional fault diagnosis methods cannot meet the diagnostic accuracy requirements because of the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the MCS. Committed to achieving bearing fault diagnosis through MCS, a rolling bearing fault diagnosis method, ISCV-ViT, based on the MCS and the Vision Transformer (ViT) model, is proposed. In particular, a signal processing method based on the instantaneous square current value (ISCV) is proposed to process the MCS directly obtained through a frequency converter into time-domain images. Then, the ViT model is applied for bearing fault diagnosis. Finally, experimental verification is carried out based on the public bearing dataset of Paderborn University (PU) and the bearing dataset of Shenzhen Technology University (SZTU). The analysis of the experimental results demonstrates that the average accuracy of the ISCV-ViT for the two datasets is up to 96.60% and 94.87%, respectively.

The lack of labeled data and variable working conditions brings challenges to the application of intelligent fault diagnosis. Given this, extracting labeled information and learning distribution-invariant representation provides a feasible and promising way. Enlightened by metric learning and semi-supervised architecture, a triplet-guided path-interaction ladder network (Tri-CLAN) is proposed based on the aspects of algorithm structure and feature space. An encoder–decoder structure with path interaction is built to utilize the unlabeled data with fewer parameters, and the network structure is simplified by CNN and an element additive combination activation function. Metric learning is introduced to the feature space of the established algorithm structure, which enables the mining of hard samples from extremely limited labeled data and the learning of working condition-independent representations. The generalization and applicability of Tri-CLAN are proved by experiments, and the contribution of the algorithm structure and the metric learning in the feature space are discussed.