Data enhanced deep transfer learning for health state evaluation of cutting tools

Health state estimation of cutting tools is a key component for maintaining the reliability and stability of the manufacturing process. Although deep learning (DL) based tool wear indirect monitoring methods have been presented, most of them require a substantial amount of data to avoid high misclassification rates. To this end, this article proposes a novel estimation approach based on data-enhanced deep transfer learning (TL) methodology, which integrates multivariate data enhancements, deep convolution network, and generative adversarial learning for state assessment of the tool wear under small sample size. The proposed method includes three innovative points: 1) a multi-step data enhancement method is employed to augment the wavelet scalogram data as model input; 2) a novel training process is adopted to obtain optimal hyperparameters of TL-AlexNet and TL-VGGNet-16 model; 3) a deep transfer learning model for the enhanced data is presented to adaptively estimate the health state of the cutting tools. The proposed approach only requires a small quantity of data to achieve satisfactory estimation performance compared with other DL methods through experimental validation, and the average prediction accuracy for each stage is greater than 95%, which demonstrates the effectiveness and superiority of the presented model.