Diagnosing incipient faults of rotating machines is very important for reducing economic losses and avoiding accidents caused by faults. However, diagnoses of locations and sizes of incipient faults are very difficult in a noisy background. In this paper, we propose a fault diagnosis method that combines kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) and deep belief network (DBN) to detect sizes and locations of incipient faults on rolling bearings. Effective information of raw vibration signals processed by KPCA method is used as input signals of the DBN of which weights of the first RBM are initialized by contribution rates of principal components. A DBN with complex structures can be cut into a briefer network by KPCA-DBN model. That model reduces network structure and increases convergence rate. As a result, an average test accuracy by KPCA-DBN can reach 99.1% for identification of 12 labels including incipient faults and the training time is 28s which is half of that by DBN model. The average accuracy of rolling bearing location detection nearly gets to 100% and the average accuracy of fault size detection is above 99%. Compared with SVM, BP, CNN, Deep EMD-PCA (Empirical Mode Decomposition-Principal Component Analysis), CNN-SVM and DBN, it is found that training time can be shortened and detection accuracy can be improved by KPCA-DBN model. The proposed method is beneficial to realize sizes and locations detection of incipient faults online
