Segmented infrared image analysis for rotating machinery fault diagnosis

• A segmented infrared image analysis method is presented for machinery diagnosis.
• A dispersion degree criterion is formulated to guide the fault-related region selection.
• The effectiveness of presented method is experimentally validated.

As a noncontact and non-intrusive technique, infrared image analysis becomes promising for machinery defect diagnosis. However, the insignificant information and strong noise in infrared image limit its performance. To address this issue, this paper presents an image segmentation approach to enhance the feature extraction in infrared image analysis. A region selection criterion named dispersion degree is also formulated to discriminate fault representative regions from unrelated background information. Feature extraction and fusion methods are then applied to obtain features from selected regions for further diagnosis. Experimental studies on a rotor fault simulator demonstrate that the presented segmented feature enhancement approach outperforms the one from the original image using both Naïve Bayes classifier and support vector machine.