When fault occurs in bearing, the frequency spectrum of vibration signal would change and it contains a considerable amount of fault information which can reflect the actual work condition and the fault type of bearing. Recently, the statistical features of the frequency spectrum have been widely used in bearing fault diagnosis. However, there are lots of statistical features with different sensitivity to fault identification. Selecting the most sensible statistical features for improving classification accuracy is often determined with experience, which will make great subjective influence on the fault diagnosis results. Deep belief network (DBN) is a deep neural network which can automatically find a latent hierarchical feature representation from the high dimension input data. In this study, a bearing fault diagnosis method based on Hilbert envelope spectrum and DBN is proposed. Firstly, the vibration signals under different test conditions are resampled. Secondly, the whole Hilbert envelope spectrum of the resampled signal is used directly as eigenvector to characterize the fault type of bearing. Finally, a DBN classifier model is established to recognize the fault type of bearing. DBN classifier model can be used as both an automatic feature extractor and a classifier for bearing fault diagnosis. Therefore, the process of fault diagnosis can be greatly simplified. The results of two different experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the competing methods and it can obtain a more excellent diagnostic performance
