Gear pitting fault is one of the most common faults in mechanical transmission. Acoustic emission (AE) signals have been effective for gear fault detection because they are less affected by ambient noise than traditional vibration signals. To overcome the problem of low gear pitting fault recognition rate using AE signals and convolutional neural networks, this paper proposes a new method named augmented convolution sparse autoencoder (ACSAE) for gear pitting fault diagnosis using raw AE signals. First, the proposed method combines sparse autoencoder and one-dimensional convolutional neural networks for unsupervised learning and then uses the reinforcement theory to enhance the adaptability and robustness of the network. The ACSAE method can automatically extract fault features directly from the original AE signals without time and frequency domain conversion of the AE signals. AE signals collected from gear test experiments are used to validate the ACSAE method. The analysis result of the gear pitting fault test shows that the proposed method can effectively performing recognition of the gear pitting faults, and the recognition rate reaches above 98%. The comparative analysis shows that in comparison with fully-connected neural networks, convolutional neural networks, and recurrent neural networks, the ACSAE method has achieved a better diagnostic accuracy for gear fitting faults.