The fault characteristics of incipient fault gears are relatively weak and easily buried by background noise. Moreover, the characteristics of fault gears exhibit similarities to those of normal gears, which may easily lead to misdiagnosis or missed diagnosis. To address these problems, an improved dynamic time warping (IDTW) method is proposed, and a methodology that combines IDTW and multivariate variational mode decomposition (MVMD) is also developed to extract the fault characteristics of incipient fault gears. In the developed methodology, MVMD is utilized to decompose the vibration signa...
