• CN: 11-2187/TH
  • ISSN: 0577-6686

Journal of Mechanical Engineering ›› 2026, Vol. 62 ›› Issue (9): 254-267.doi: 10.3901/JME.260296

Previous Articles    

Intelligent Recognition of Artificial Joint Wear Debris by Radar Graph Fractal Feature Prior Convolutional Network

ZHANG Weipeng1,2, GU Yongqing1, LUO Yong2, QU Luping2,3   

  1. 1. School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Henan Institute of Science and Technology, Xinxiang 453003;
    2. School of Materials Science and Physics, China University of Mining and Technology, Xuzhou 221116;
    3. School of Automotive and Transportation, Yancheng Polytechnic College, Yancheng 224005
  • Received:2025-06-09 Revised:2025-11-16 Published:2026-07-08

Abstract: Artificial joint wear debris generate from the frictional motion of joint pairs, carrying mount of micro scale wear information. However, most of the artificial joint wear debris research is mainly by manual recognition, which lacks objective evaluation criteria. Classification and recognition of wear debris belongs to the image recognition field, intelligent classification such as convolutional neural network may solve the drawbacks of manual analysis. Therefore, radar graph fractal feature prior convolutional network is constructed to realize the intelligent recognition of artificial joint wear debris. Firstly, fractal dimension values of wear debris are calculated by the improved radar method, and the fractal dimension is used as the fixed characteristic of the wear debris to perform prior judgment. The judgement results are imported into the convolutional neural network models AlexNet and deep residual network (ResNet) to recognize the wear debris class. The models are trained in the wear debris picture dataset collected from literatures, and the generalization ability of the models is verified in the experimental dataset. The data augmentation method is also employed to expand the dataset and balance the uneven distribution among debris classes. Moreover, to compare the performance difference between the convolutional neural networks and ordinary machine learning models, a support vector machine (SVM) model is also used to classify the debris classes for the training data. The results showed that the radar graph fractal dimension had a good correlation with the shape distribution of the wear debris. The recognition accuracy and precision of convolutional neural network models are significantly higher than that of SVM. The fractal dimension prior judgment and data augmentation can obviously improve the recognition accuracy of the original model. The recognition accuracy of models based on AlexNet and ResNet networks reach 83.70% and 89.26%, respectively, which is higher than 80.74% and 82.59% of the AlexNet and ResNet original models of networks. The recognition accuracy models based on AlexNet and ResNet networks on the validation data are 86.60% and 88.66% respectively, which are close to the models on the training data, showing good generalization ability.

Key words: artificial joint wear debris, radar graph fracture dimension, convolutional neural network, intelligent identification

CLC Number: