
Enhanced CNN with Global Features for Fault Diagnosis of Complex
Chemical Processes
Qiugang Lu a,1, and Saif S. S. Al-Wahaibi a
aDepartment of Chemical Engineering, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX 79409, USA
Abstract
Convolutional neural network (CNN) models have been widely used for fault diagnosis of complex systems.
However, traditional CNN models rely on small kernel filters to obtain local features from images. Thus, an excessively
deep CNN is required to capture global features, which are critical for fault diagnosis of dynamical systems. In this
work, we present an improved CNN that embeds global features (GF-CNN). Our method uses a multi-layer perceptron
(MLP) for dimension reduction to directly extract global features and integrate them into the CNN. The advantage of
this method is that both local and global patterns in images can be captured by a simple model architecture instead of
establishing deep CNN models. The proposed method is applied to the fault diagnosis of the Tennessee Eastman process.
Simulation results show that the GF-CNN can significantly improve the fault diagnosis performance compared to
traditional CNN. The proposed method can also be applied to other areas such as computer vision and image processing.
Keywords
Convolutional neural network, Global features, Fault diagnosis, Chemical process.
1. Introduction
Deep learning methods have prevailed in various fault di-
agnosis applications due to their unique effectiveness in auto-
matic feature extractions directly from raw data Zhang et al.
(2020). Research has been reported on using deep learning
methods, e.g., deep belief network Shao et al. (2015), recur-
rent neural network Jiang et al. (2018), auto-encoders Zheng
and Zhao (2020), and convolutional neural networks (CNN)
Wen et al. (2017). Exemplary applications include fault di-
agnosis of wind turbine gearbox Jing et al. (2017), rotating
machine bearings Zhao et al. (2019), and complex chemical
processes Huang et al. (2022). Such deep learning models
can extract abstract features from the data and capture non-
linearity, thereby exhibiting superior performance than tradi-
tional machine learning methods Wen et al. (2017).
Among the variety of deep learning methods that have
been explored, CNN has attracted wide attention due to its
excellent performance in complex feature learning and clas-
sification Zhang et al. (2017). CNN was firstly used by
Janssens et al. (2016) for fault detection of rotating machin-
ery. Further advancements include Wen et al. (2017); Zhang
et al. (2018) and the references therein, where a number of
strategies were proposed for converting time-series data into
images. To capture different levels of features, multi-scale
CNN has been put forward where different kernel sizes are
proposed, e.g., Chen et al. (2021). Along this line, wide
kernels have been employed as the first few layers of CNN,
1Corresponding author: Q. Lu (E-mail: jay.lu@ttu.edu).
followed by small kernels for improving the feature repre-
sentation Zhang et al. (2017); van den Hoogen et al. (2020);
Song et al. (2022). However, these reported studies mainly
focus on the fault diagnosis of rotating machinery where the
number of variables is small. Study on CNNs and their vari-
ants for fault diagnosis of complex chemical processes still
remains limited Wu and Zhao (2018).
Complex chemical processes are featured by high dimen-
sions, with strong spatial and temporal correlations among
variables Lu et al. (2019). CNN model-based fault diagnosis
for chemical processes has only been preliminarily attempted
Wu and Zhao (2018); Huang et al. (2022). The obtained diag-
nosis performance is still far from satisfaction for real-world
applications Shao et al. (2019). Moreover, existing research
mainly focuses on extracting local features from process
data, despite of the efforts on multi-scale CNN to enlarge
the receptive field Song and Jiang (2022). For chemical pro-
cesses, global features are also critical due to the complex in-
terconnection of multiple units and thus the widespread cou-
pling between process variables. Specifically, when forming
images from multivariate time-series data, variables that are
far apart may also possess strong correlations (e.g., see Fig.
3 below). Traditional CNN methods, including multi-scale
CNN, cannot directly capture global features and often re-
quire deep layers to expand the receptive field to the entire
image Song and Jiang (2022). This motivates us to develop a
novel CNN architecture that can extract both global and local
features in images to improve the fault diagnosis rate.
In this work, we present a novel global feature-enhanced
CNN (GF-CNN) for the fault diagnosis of complex chemi-
arXiv:2210.01727v1 [eess.SY] 4 Oct 2022