Detection of signal transients using independent component analysis and its application in gearbox condition monitoring

This paper addresses feature extraction of the higher-order statistics, which can effectively characterize the transients, using independent component analysis (ICA) for the one-dimensional measured vibration signal, and then proposes a novel automatic technique for detecting the transients in vibration signals with the low signal-to-noise ratio by ICA feature extraction. The basic principle of the ICA-based transient detection method is that the independent components (ICs) coefficients of the transients and the noise can be effectively distinguished by their different sparseness properties. Specifically, the proposed method mainly includes three steps: training the ICA basis features from the signal segments, denoising the sparse ICs coefficients using the shrinkage function deduced by the maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation, and reconstructing the transient segments by the shrunken coefficients through the ICA basis functions. Experimental results through the simulated signal analysis and the vibration signal analysis show that the ICA-based method is very effective for transient detection outperforming the traditional methods and is valuable for gearbox condition monitoring and fault diagnosis.