FFWR-Net: A feature fusion wear particle recognition network for wear particle classification

Wear particles produced by machines in the process of wear carry valuable information including wear mechanism and wear severity. Wear particle classification based on wear particle images provides predictive analysis for wear condition of machines. A novel wear particle recognition network based on feature fusion, FFWR-Net, is proposed in this research paper for wear particle images classification. In FFWR-Net, traditional feature extraction method by image processing technique (i.e. manually feature extracting) and deep learning convolutional neural network method (i.e. automatically feature extracting) is paralleled to extract the features of wear particle image. Then the features obtained by two different methods are fused together for building a wear particle classifier. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed classifier, it is compared with the previous convolutional neural network models on the same wear particle dataset. The comparison results show the accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed FFWR-Net classifier is better than the previous models.