In practical engineering applications, noise often contaminates the fault signals of rolling bearings, making the accurate diagnosis of compound faults challenging. To address this issue, this paper introduces an enhanced dual-channel DenseNet-GRU model for the diagnosis of compound faults in rolling bearings. The model constructs a DenseNet channel for initial feature extraction, while integrating a gated recurrent unit (GRU) with convolutional and pooling layers to form a GRU channel, aiming to extract linear features. By employing a dual-channel connection approach, the model minimizes potential information loss or error accumulation that may occur in single-model structures. In the identification module, a multi-label classification framework is established to recognize compound faults. The proposed model underwent evaluation using the Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) dataset, with findings indicating that the DC-DenseNet-GRU architecture consistently delivers robust performance across varying load and noise scenarios.