Biologically inspired information integration pooling module of spiking neural networks for rolling bearing fault diagnosis

Rolling bearings constitute critical components in mechanical systems, and their effective fault diagnosis plays a vital role in ensuring operational safety and reliability. Despite substantial advancements in diagnostic methodologies, achieving high-precision, low-latency fault detection in large-scale rolling bearing datasets remains a persistent challenge. Artificial neural networks to spiking neural networks (ANN-to-SNN) conversion algorithms offer promising solutions for reducing computational costs and hardware adaptation barriers compared to conventional approaches. However, inherent information degradation during conversion processes has been demonstrated to significantly undermine model performance in terms of accuracy, stability, and interpretability. To overcome these limitations, we propose IIPooling, a novel Information-Integration biological neural mechanism-inspired Pooling module designed to enhance global structural feature extraction. The proposed framework incorporates three core neurobiological information processing principles: (1) promotion, (2) lateral inhibition, and (3) longitudinal inhibition, effectively simulating biological neuronal spiking patterns while optimally utilizing ANN activation characteristics. Additionally, we develop two adaptive learning mechanisms — Surrogate Gradient Adaptive Learning and Spiking Spatiotemporal Adaptive Learning — to implement negative feedback mechanism and adaptive parameter adjustment, thereby improving cross-conditional generalization capabilities. Comprehensive evaluations conducted on five bearing datasets (CWRU: DE/FE, PU, and Lab-collected: 6025/N205EW) demonstrate superior performance across four metrics (ACC, AUC, AUPRC, Mean-ACC). Our method achieves state-of-the-art results, notably attaining ACC values of 0.959 (CWRU-DE) and 0.861 (Lab-N205EW) in IIPooling-ST configurations, confirming its effectiveness for real-time, high-accuracy fault detection in complex operational environments.