To address the drawbacks of traditional convolutional neural network-based rolling bearing fault diagnosis techniques, including poor feature extraction, low diagnostic accuracy, and poor generalization capability, a dual-channel rolling bearing fault diagnosis model based on VMD-BiGRU and GADF-ResNet-CBAM was proposed. Variational mode decomposition (VMD) was used to first break down and reconstruct the original vibration signal. The rebuilt signal was then input into a bidirectional gated recurrent unit (BiGRU) network in order to extract temporal information. Second, the Gramian angular difference field (GADF) transformed the one-dimensional vibration signal into a two-dimensional picture. This image was then fed into a residual network that was merged with the convolutional block attention module (CBAM) in order to extract spatial characteristics. After concatenating and fusing the data from the two channels, Softmax was finally employed at the output layer to classify different types of faults. The Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) bearing dataset and a self-collected independent dataset from the Xinjiang University experimental rig were utilized for validation. The model achieved diagnosis accuracies of 99.39% and 99.58%, respectively. These results demonstrate the robustness and practical applicability of the proposed method on data acquired from distinct hardware sources and experimental environments, outperforming alternative approaches.