Gear fault diagnosis (GFD) based on vibration signals is a popular research topic in industry and academia. This paper provides a comprehensive summary and systematic review of vibration signal‐based GFD methods in recent years, thereby providing insights for relevant researchers. The authors first introduce the common gear faults and their vibration signal characteristics. The authors overview and compare the common feature extraction methods, such as adaptive mode decomposition, deconvolution, mathematical morphological filtering, and entropy. For each method, this paper introduces its idea, analyses its advantages and disadvantages, and reviews its application in GFD. Then the authors present machine learning‐based methods for gear fault recognition and emphasise deep learning‐based methods. Moreover, the authors compare different fault recognition methods. Finally, the authors discuss the challenges and opportunities towards data‐driven GFD.

Efficient and accurate fault diagnosis of rotating machinery is extremely important. Fault diagnosis methods using vibration signals based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have become increasingly mature. They often struggle with capturing the temporal dynamics of vibration signals. To overcome this, the application of Transformer-based Vision Transformer (ViT) methods to fault diagnosis is gaining attraction. Nonetheless, these methods typically require extensive preprocessing, which increases computational complexity, potentially reducing the efficiency of the diagnosis process. Addressing this gap, this paper presents the Time Series Vision Transformer (TSViT), tailored for effective fault diagnosis. The TSViT incorporates a convolutional layer to extract local features from vibration signals alongside a transformer encoder to discern long-term temporal patterns. A thorough experimental comparison of three diverse datasets demonstrates the TSViT’s effectiveness and adaptability. Moreover, the paper delves into the influence of hyperparameter tuning on the model’s performance, computational demand, and parameter count. Remarkably, the TSViT achieves an unprecedented 100% average accuracy on two of the test sets and 99.99% on the other, showcasing its exceptional fault diagnosis capabilities for rotating machinery. The implementation of this model will bring significant economic benefits.