Multi-Branch Joint Time-Frequency Transformer for Domain Generalization Fault Diagnosis of Rotating Machinery

Conventional time-frequency Transformers primarily focus on the global features of signals in the time-frequency domain while neglecting the local features in both the time domain and frequency domain. This limitation hinders the ability of the model to effectively capture the shared features among time, frequency, and time-frequency representations. To address this issue, a Multi-Branch Joint Time-Frequency Transformer (MBJTF-Transformer) is proposed for domain generalization (DG) fault diagnosis of rotating machinery. Specifically, a time-branch Transformer is designed to extract temporal features, while a frequency-branch Transformer captures frequency-domain information. In addition, a time-frequency Transformer is employed to learn the shared representations across time, frequency, and time-frequency domains. Finally, a multi-decision fusion strategy of MBJTF-Transformer is adopted to enhance the generalization capability of the model. Experimental results on both the SCARA (Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm, SCARA) dataset and the PU (Paderborn University) bearing dataset demonstrate that the proposed MBJTF-Transformer achieves superior DG performance compared to multiple state-of-the-art sequential models.