Fault Detection and Localization in Motorcycles Based on the Chain Code of Pseudospectra and Acoustic Signals

Vehicles produce sound signals with varying temporal and spectral properties under different working conditions. These sounds are indicative of the condition of the engine. Fault diagnosis is a significantly difficult task in geographically remote places where expertise is scarce. Automated fault diagnosis can assist riders to assess the health condition of their vehicles. This paper presents a method for fault detection and location in motorcycles based on the chain code of the pseudospectra and Mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) features of acoustic signals. The work comprises two stages: fault detection and fault location. The fault detection stage uses the chain code of the pseudospectrum as a feature vector. If the motorcycle is identified as faulty, the MFCCs of the same sample are computed and used as features for fault location. Both stages employ dynamic time warping for the classification of faults. Five types of faults in motorcycles are considered in this work. Observed classification rates are over 90% for the fault detection stage and over 94% for the fault location stage. The work identifies other interesting applications in the development of acoustic fingerprints for fault diagnosis of machinery, tuning of musical instruments, medical diagnosis, etc.