A fast three-dimensional display method for time-frequency spectrogram used in embedded fault diagnosis devices

Abstract

Time-frequency analysis is usually used to reveal the appearance of different frequency components varying with time, in signals, of which time-frequency spectrogram is an important visual tool to display the information. The Mesh Surface Generation (MSG) algorithm is widely used in three-dimensional (3D) modeling. Removing hidden lines from the mesh plot is an essential process that produces explicit depth information. In this paper, a fast and effective method has been proposed for a time-frequency Spectrogram Mesh Surface Generation (SMSG) display, especially, based on the painter's algorithm. In addition, most portable fault diagnosis devices have little function to generate a 3D spectrogram, which generally needs a general computer to realize the complex time-frequency analysis algorithms and a 3D display. However, general computer is not portable and then not suitable for field test. Hence, the proposed SMSG algorithm is applied to an embedded fault diagnosis device, which is light, low-cost, and real-time. The experimental results show that this approach can realize a high degree of accuracy and save considerable time.