Engine speed estimation and accelerometer-position classification using envelope spectrograms and an attention-branch neural network from engine vibration of a small fishing vessel
The National Institute of Fisheries Science is developing a vibration-based anomaly detection system for small fishing vessel engine rooms. Since the fault types that can occur in such engines are highly diverse and fault-labeled data are difficult to collect for every type, the system is designed to learn the range of normal operating signals and flag deviations from that range as anomalies rather than learning each fault type individually. This normal-data-based approach requires a reliable way to define and measure the normal operating state, and engine speed (RPM) is the most basic such variable. As part of this effort, this study proposes a deep-learning method that estimates RPM directly from engine-room vibration and simultaneously classifies the accelerometer mounting position, using only magnet-mounted accelerometers that require no engine modification, and quantifies which mounting position most clearly captures this normal signal. Four-channel vibration signals were measured on a 9.77-ton coastal purse seiner with an inline-six marine diesel engine whose speed ranged 447-1,444 RPM during the sea trial off Tongyeong, Korea. Hilbert-envelope spectrograms (0-100 Hz) of the four channels were fed into an attention-branch convolutional network with approximately 0.39 M parameters, trained in two stages for RPM regression and position classification. The proposed method achieved a mean absolute error of 42.9 ± 2.1 RPM (about 5% relative error; RMSE 66.3 RPM, = 0.935 for the representative model) and a position classification accuracy of 99.6% on the time-sequential test set. Ablation experiments showed that the envelope demodulation and the 100-Hz bandwidth, which covers the firing frequency and up to the 13th rotational harmonic, were the dominant factors. The learned attention weights were highest for the channel near the power-transmission end of the engine and varied with the operating range, indicating which position most reliably captures the normal signal under each condition and demonstrating the benefit of adaptive multi-channel fusion.