Hierarchical Flow-Based Anomaly Detection Model for Motor Gearbox Defect Detection

In this paper, a motor gearbox fault-detection system based on a hierarchical flow-based model is proposed. The proposed system is used for the anomaly detection of a motion sound-based actuator module. The proposed flow-based model, which is a generative model, learns by directly modeling a data distribution function. As the objective function is the maximum likelihood value of the input data, the training is stable and simple to use for anomaly detection. The operation sound of a car’s side-view mirror motor is converted into a Mel-spectrogram image, consisting of a folding signal and an unfolding signal, and used as training data in this experiment. The proposed system is composed of an encoder and a decoder. The data extracted from the layer of the pretrained feature extractor are used as the decoder input data in the encoder. This information is used in the decoder by performing an interlayer cross-scale convolution operation. The experimental results indicate that the context information of various dimensions extracted from the interlayer hierarchical data improves the defect detection accuracy. This paper is notable because it uses acoustic data and a normalizing flow model to detect outliers based on the features of experimental data.