Due to the non-stationary characteristics of vibration signals acquired from rolling element bearing fault, the time-frequency analysis is often applied to describe the local information of these unstable signals smartly. However, it is difficult to classify the high dimensional feature matrix directly because of too large dimensions for many classifiers. This paper combines the concepts of time-frequency distribution(TFD) with non-negative matrix factorization(NMF), and proposes a novel TFD matrix factorization method to enhance representation and identification of bearing fault. Throughout this method, the TFD of a vibration signal is firstly accomplished to describe the localized faults with short-time Fourier transform(STFT). Then, the supervised NMF mapping is adopted to extract the fault features from TFD. Meanwhile, the fault samples can be clustered and recognized automatically by using the clustering property of NMF. The proposed method takes advantages of the NMF in the parts-based representation and the adaptive clustering. The localized fault features of interest can be extracted as well. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, the 9 kinds of the bearing fault on a test bench is performed. The proposed method can effectively identify the fault severity and different fault types. Moreover, in comparison with the artificial neural network(ANN), NMF yields 99.3% mean accuracy which is much superior to ANN. This research presents a simple and practical resolution for the fault diagnosis problem of rolling element bearing in high dimensional feature space.

As an important paradigm of spontaneous brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), motor imagery (MI) has been widely used in the fields of neurological rehabilitation and robot control. Recently, researchers have proposed various methods for feature extraction and classification based on MI signals. The decoding model based on deep neural networks (DNNs) has attracted significant attention in the field of MI signal processing. Due to the strict requirements for subjects and experimental environments, it is difficult to collect large-scale and high-quality electroencephalogram (EEG) data. However, the performance of a deep learning model depends directly on the size of the datasets. Therefore, the decoding of MI-EEG signals based on a DNN has proven highly challenging in practice. Based on this, we investigated the performance of different data augmentation (DA) methods for the classification of MI data using a DNN. First, we transformed the time series signals into spectrogram images using a short-time Fourier transform (STFT). Then, we evaluated and compared the performance of different DA methods for this spectrogram data. Next, we developed a convolutional neural network (CNN) to classify the MI signals and compared the classification performance of after DA. The Fréchet inception distance (FID) was used to evaluate the quality of the generated data (GD) and the classification accuracy, and mean kappa values were used to explore the best CNN-DA method. In addition, analysis of variance (ANOVA) and paired t-tests were used to assess the significance of the results. The results showed that the deep convolutional generative adversarial network (DCGAN) provided better augmentation performance than traditional DA methods: geometric transformation (GT), autoencoder (AE), and variational autoencoder (VAE) (p < 0.01). Public datasets of the BCI competition IV (datasets 1 and 2b) were used to verify the classification performance. Improvements in the classification accuracies of 17% and 21% (p < 0.01) were observed after DA for the two datasets. In addition, the hybrid network CNN-DCGAN outperformed the other classification methods, with average kappa values of 0.564 and 0.677 for the two datasets.

Recently, cross-domain fault diagnosis based on transfer learning methods has been extensively explored and well-addressed when class-balance data with supervision information are available. However, data under machine faulty states are mostly difficult to collect; there is a huge divide between current transfer learning methods based on implicit class-balance data and real industrial applications. In this article, we propose a class-imbalance adversarial transfer learning (CIATL) network with input being imbalanced data to learn domain-invariant and knowledge. Within this framework, class-imbalance learning is embedded into the adversarial training process to learn class-separate diagnostic knowledge with imbalanced data, double-level adversarial transfer learning including marginal and conditional distribution adaptations is conducted to learn domain-invariant knowledge. Extensive experiments on a planetary gearbox rig with imbalanced data verify the effectiveness and generalization of the proposed method and show its superior performance over contrastive transfer learning methods. Moreover, the proposed method relaxes the underlying assumption that the success of current transfer learning regimes is rooted in class-balance data and extends the application of the transfer learning method for real-industrial cross-domain diagnosis tasks.

Steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP) based paradigm is a conventional BCI method with the advantages of high information transfer rate, high tolerance to artifacts and the robust performance across users. But the occurrence of mental load and fatigue when users stare at flickering stimuli is a critical problem in implementation of SSVEP-based BCIs. Based on electroencephalography (EEG) power indices α, θ, θ + α, ratio index θ/α and response properties of amplitude and SNR, this study quantitatively evaluated the mental load and fatigue in both of conventional flickering and the novel motion-reversal visual attention tasks. Results over nine subjects revealed significant mental load alleviation in motion-reversal task rather than flickering task. The interaction between factors of “stimulation type” and “fatigue level” also illustrated the motion-reversal stimulation as a superior anti-fatigue solution for long-term BCI operation. Taken together, our work provided an objective method favorable for the design of more practically applicable steady-state evoked potential based BCIs.