Lihai Chen, Yonghui He, Aobo Tan, Xiaolong Bai, Zhenshui Li, Xiaoqiang Wang
As a core component of the gearbox, bearings are crucial to the stability and reliability of the transmission system. However, dynamic variations in operating conditions and complex noise interference present limitations for existing fault diagnosis methods in processing non-stationary signals and capturing complex features. To address the aforementioned challenges, this paper proposes a bearing fault diagnosis method based on a multi-feature fusion dual-channel CNN-Transformer-CAM framework. The model cross-fuses the two-dimensional feature images from Gramian Angular Difference Field (GADF) and Generalized S Transform (GST), preserving complete time–frequency domain information. First, a dual-channel parallel convolutional structure is employed to separately sample the generalized S-transform (GST) maps and the Gramian Angular Difference Field (GADF) maps, enriching fault information from different dimensions and effectively enhancing the model’s feature extraction capability. Subsequently, a Transformer structure is introduced at the backend of the convolutional neural network to strengthen the representation and analysis of complex time–frequency features. Finally, a cross-attention mechanism is applied to dynamically adjust features from the two channels, achieving adaptive weighted fusion. Test results demonstrate that under conditions of noise interference, limited samples, and multiple operating states, the proposed method can effectively achieve the accurate assessment of bearing fault conditions.