Singular value decomposition based feature extraction approaches for classifying faults of induction motors

This paper proposes singular value decomposition (SVD)-based feature extraction methods for fault classification of an induction motor: a short-time energy (STE) plus SVD technique in the time-domain analysis, and a discrete cosine transform (DCT) plus SVD technique in the frequency-domain analysis. To early identify induction motor faults, the extracted features are utilized as the inputs of multi-layer support vector machines (MLSVMs). Since SVMs perform well with the radial basis function (RBF) kernel for appropriately categorizing the faults of the induction motor, it is important to explore the impact of the a values for the RBF kernel, which affects the classification accuracy. Likewise, this paper quantitatively evaluates the classification accuracy with different numbers of features, because the number of features affects the classification accuracy. According to the experimental results, although SVD-based features are effective for a noiseless environment, the STE plus SVD feature extraction approach is more effective with and without sensor noise in terms of the classification accuracy than the DCT plus SVD feature extraction approach. To demonstrate the improved classification of the proposed approach for identifying faults of the induction motor, the proposed SVD based feature extraction approach is compared with other state-of-the art methods and yields higher classification accuracies for both noiseless and noisy environments than conventional approaches. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.