Edge computing is an emerging paradigm that offloads the computations and analytics workloads onto the Internet of Things (IoT) edge devices to accelerate the computation efficiency, reduce the channel occupation of signal transmission, and reduce the storage and computation workloads on the cloud servers. These distinct merits make it a promising tool for IoT-based machine signal processing and fault diagnosis. This article reviews the edge computing methods in signal processing-based machine fault diagnosis from the aspects of concepts, state-of-the-art methods, case studies, and research prospects. In particular, the lightweight designed algorithms and application-specific hardware platforms of edge computing in the typical fault diagnosis procedures, including signal acquisition, signal preprocessing, feature extraction, and pattern recognition, are reviewed and discussed in detail. The review provides an insight into the edge computing framework, methods, and applications, so as to meet the requirements of IoT-based machine real-time signal processing, low-latency fault diagnosis, and high-efficient predictive maintenance.

The existing fault diagnosis methods of rotating machinery constructed with both shallow learning and deep learning models are mostly based on vibration analysis under steady rotating speed. However, the rotating speed frequently changes to meet practical engineering needs. The shallow learning models largely depend on domain experience of feature extraction, and training a deep learning model requires large samples and a long time. In addition, vibration monitoring has the shortcomings of contact measurement, small coverage, and noise interference. To address these problems, this article proposes a new fault diagnosis method with the least square interactive support matrix machine (LSISMM) and infrared thermal images. In this method, a novel matrix-form classifier called LSISMM is constructed under the concept of nonparallel interactive hyperplanes to fully leverage the structure information of infrared thermal images. To improve the computation efficiency, a new least square loss constraint is designed for LSISMM. Besides, we derive an effective solution framework based on the alternating direction method of the multiplier (ADMM) framework. The constructed LSISMM is directly used to analyze the collected thermal images of rotating machinery under time-varying speeds. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method is superior to state-of-the-art methods in terms of diagnosis accuracy and efficiency, especially under small thermal image samples.