Fault Diagnosis System based on Sound using Feature Extraction Method of Frequency Domain

Sound based machine fault diagnosis is the process consisting of detecting automatically the damages that affect the machines by analyzing the sounds they produce during their operating time. The collected sounds being inevitably corrupted by random disturbance, the most important part of the diagnosis consists of discovering the hidden elements inside the data that can reveal the faulty patterns. This paper presents a novel feature extraction methodology that combines various digital signal processing and pattern recognition methods for the analysis of the sounds produced by the drills. Using the Fourier analysis, the magnitude spectrum of the sounds are extracted, converted into two-dimensional vectors and uniformly normalized in such a way that they can be represented as 8-bit grayscale images. Histogram equalization is then performed over the obtained images in order to adjust their very poor contrast. The obtained contrast enhanced images will be used as the features of our diagnosis system. Finally, principal component analysis is performed over the image features for reducing their dimensions and a nonlinear classifier is adopted to produce the final response. Unlike the conventional features, the results demonstrate that the proposed feature extraction method manages to capture the hidden health patterns of the sound.