Abstract
With the rapid growth of high-voltage transmission lines, the number of power transmission line equipments is correspondingly increasing. Power insulator is the basic component which plays the key role in the stable operation of power system. As a common defect of power insulators, missing-cap issue will affect the structural strength and durability of different power insulators. Therefore, the condition monitoring of power insulators is a daily but priority power line inspection task. Faced with the weak image features of small insulator defects in the aerial images, the conventional handcrafted features could not extract effectively powerful image features. Meanwhile, the small-scale insulator defects will bring a certain effect to the model training of deep learning. Therefore, the high-efficiency and accurate defect inspection still present a challenging task against complex backgrounds. To address the above issues, aimed at the missing-cap defects of power insulators, a novel defect identification algorithm from aerial images is proposed by taking advantage of state-of-the-art deep learning and transfer learning models. Fused with Spatial Pyramid Pooling (SPP) and MobileNet networks, a light deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) model based on You Only Look Once (YOLO) V3 network is proposed for fast and accurate insulator location to remove complex background interference. On the basis, combined with Dempster–Shafer (DS) evidence theory, the improved transfer learning model based on feature fusion is proposed for high-precision defect identification of power insulators. Experiments show that the proposed method could acquire a better identification performance against complex power inspection environment compared with other related detection models.












Similar content being viewed by others
Explore related subjects
Discover the latest articles, news and stories from top researchers in related subjects.References
Zhang H, Sun M, Li Q, Liu L, Liu M, Ji Y (2021) An empirical study of multi-scale object detection in high resolution uav images. Neurocomputing 421:173–182
Gong X, Yao Q, Wang M, Lin Y (2018) A deep learning approach for oriented electrical equipment detection in thermal images. IEEE Access 6:41590–41597
Yang J, Kang Z (2018) Voxel-based extraction of transmission lines from airborne lidar point cloud data. IEEE J Select Top Appl Earth Observ Remote Sens 11(10):3892–3904
Zhong J, Liu Z, Han Z, Han Y, Zhang W (2018) A cnn-based defect inspection method for catenary split pins in high-speed railway. IEEE Trans Instrum Meas 68(8):2849–2860
Zhao Z, Fan X, Xu G, Zhang L, Qi Y, Zhang K (2017) Aggregating deep convolutional feature maps for insulator detection in infrared images. IEEE Access 5:21831–21839
Wang Y, Chen Q, Liu L, Zheng D, Li C, Li K (2017) Supervised classification of power lines from airborne lidar data in urban areas. Remote Sens 9(8):771
Lyu Y, Han Z, Zhong J, Li C, Liu Z (2019) A generic anomaly detection of catenary support components based on generative adversarial networks. IEEE Trans Instrum Meas 69(5):2439–2448
Jenssen R, Roverso D et al (2018) Automatic autonomous vision-based power line inspection: a review of current status and the potential role of deep learning. Int J Electr Power Energy Syst 99:107–120
Han J, Yang Z, Zhang Q, Chen C, Li H, Lai S, Hu G, Xu C, Xu H, Wang D et al (2019) A method of insulator faults detection in aerial images for high-voltage transmission lines inspection. Appl Sci 9(10):2009
Liao S, An J (2014) A robust insulator detection algorithm based on local features and spatial orders for aerial images. IEEE Geosci Remote Sens Lett 12(5):963–967
Wu Q, An J (2013) An active contour model based on texture distribution for extracting inhomogeneous insulators from aerial images. IEEE Trans Geosci Remote Sens 52(6):3613–3626
Yin J, Lu Y, Gong Z, Jian Y, Yao J (2019) Edge detection of high-voltage porcelain insulators in infrared image using dual parity morphological gradients. IEEE Access 7:32728–32734
Mishra DP, Ray P (2018) Fault detection, location and classification of a transmission line. Neural Comput Appl 30(5):1377–1424
Reddy MJB, Mohanta D et al (2013) Condition monitoring of 11 kv distribution system insulators incorporating complex imagery using combined dost-svm approach. IEEE Trans Dielectr Electr Insul 20(2):664–674
Yang L, Li E, Fan J, Long T, Liang Z (2019) Automatic extraction and identification of narrow butt joint based on anfis before gmaw. Int J Adv Manuf Technol 100(1–4):609–622
Murthy VS, Tarakanath K, Mohanta D, Gupta S (2010) Insulator condition analysis for overhead distribution lines using combined wavelet support vector machine (svm). IEEE Trans Dielectr Electr Insul 17(1):89–99
Zhao Z, Xu G, Qi Y (2016) Representation of binary feature pooling for detection of insulator strings in infrared images. IEEE Trans Dielectr Electr Insul 23(5):2858–2866
Tiantian Y, Guodong Y, Junzhi Y (2017) Feature fusion based insulator detection for aerial inspection, In: Proceedings of Chinese Control Conference. IEEE, pp 10972–10977
Sampedro C, Martinez C, Chauhan A, Campoy P (2014) A supervised approach to electric tower detection and classification for power line inspection, In: Proceedings of international joint conference on neural networks (IJCNN). IEEE, pp 1970–1977
Miao X, Liu X, Chen J, Zhuang S, Fan J, Jiang H (2019) Insulator detection in aerial images for transmission line inspection using single shot multibox detector. IEEE Access 7:9945–9956
Pernebayeva D, Irmanova A, Sadykova D, Bagheri M, James A (2019) High voltage outdoor insulator surface condition evaluation using aerial insulator images. High Volt 4(3):178–185
Prates RM, Cruz R, Marotta AP, Ramos RP, SimasFilho EF, Cardoso JS (2019) Insulator visual non-conformity detection in overhead power distribution lines using deep learning. Comput Electr Eng 78:343–355
Jiang H, Qiu X, Chen J, Liu X, Miao X, Zhuang S (2019) Insulator fault detection in aerial images based on ensemble learning with multi-level perception. IEEE Access 7:61797–61810
Zhao Z-Q, Zheng P, Xu S-T, Wu X (2019) Object detection with deep learning: a review. IEEE Trans Neural Netw Learn Syst 30(11):3212–3232
Liang H, Zuo C, Wei W (2020) Detection and evaluation method of transmission line defects based on deep learning. IEEE Access 8:38448–38458
Sadykova D, Pernebayeva D, Bagheri M, James A (2019) In-yolo: Real-time detection of outdoor high voltage insulators using uav imaging. IEEE Trans Power Deliv 35(3):1599–1601
Liu Y, Ji X, Pei S, Ma Z, Zhang G, Lin Y, Chen Y (2020) Research on automatic location and recognition of insulators in substation based on yolov3. High Volt 5(1):62–68
Gao Z, Yang G, Li E, Shen T, Wang Z, Tian Y, Wang H, Liang Z (2019) Insulator segmentation for power line inspection based on modified conditional generative adversarial network, J Sens, 2019
Chen H, He Z, Shi B, Zhong T (2019) Research on recognition method of electrical components based on yolo v3. IEEE Access 7:157818–157829
Ling Z, Qiu RC, Jin Z, Zhang Y, He X, Liu H, Chu L (2018) An accurate and real-time self-blast glass insulator location method based on faster r-cnn and u-net with aerial images, arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.05143
Tao X, Zhang D, Wang Z, Liu X, Zhang H, Xu D (2018) Detection of power line insulator defects using aerial images analyzed with convolutional neural networks. IEEE Trans Syst Man Cybern Syst 50(4):1486–1498
Wang H, Yang G, Li E, Tian Y, Zhao M, Liang Z (2019) High-voltage power transmission tower detection based on faster r-cnn and yolo-v3, In: Proceedings of Chinese Control Conference. IEEE, pp 8750–8755
Liu Y, Gao H, Guo L, Qin A, Cai C, You Z (2019) A data-flow oriented deep ensemble learning method for real-time surface defect inspection. IEEE Trans Instrum Meas 69(7):4681–4691
Tian Y, Yang G, Wang Z, Wang H, Li E, Liang Z (2019) Apple detection during different growth stages in orchards using the improved yolo-v3 model. Comput Electron Agric 157:417–426
Redmon J, Divvala S, Girshick R, Farhadi A (2016) You only look once: Unified, real-time object detection. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (CVPR), pp 779–788
Redmon J, Farhadi A (2017) Yolo9000: better, faster, stronger. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (CVPR), pp 7263–7271
Howard AG, Zhu M, Chen B, Kalenichenko D, Wang W, Weyand T, Andreetto M, Adam H (2017) Mobilenets: Efficient convolutional neural networks for mobile vision applications, arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.04861
He K, Zhang X, Ren S, Sun J (2015) Spatial pyramid pooling in deep convolutional networks for visual recognition. IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell 37(9):1904–1916
He K, Zhang X, Ren S, Sun J (2016) Deep residual learning for image recognition. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (CVPR), pp 770–778
Yang L, Li E, Long T, Fan J, Mao Y, Fang Z, Liang Z (2018) A welding quality detection method for arc welding robot based on 3d reconstruction with sfs algorithm. Int J Adv Manuf Technol 94(1–4):1209–1220
Wang J, Liu F (2017) Temporal evidence combination method for multi-sensor target recognition based on ds theory and ifs. J Syst Eng Electron 28(6):1114–1125
Biau G (2012) Analysis of a random forests model, The. J Mach Learn Res 13(1):1063–1095
Simonyan K, Zisserman A (2014) Very deep convolutional networks for large-scale image recognition, arXiv preprint arXiv:1409.1556
Szegedy C, Liu W, Jia Y, Sermanet P, Reed S, Anguelov D, Erhan D, Vanhoucke V, Rabinovich A (2015) Going deeper with convolutions. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (CVPR), pp 1–9
Krizhevsky A, Sutskever I, Hinton GE (2012) Imagenet classification with deep convolutional neural networks. In: Proceedings of advances in neural information processing systems, pp 1097–1105
Sandler M, Howard A, Zhu M, Zhmoginov A, Chen L-C (2018) Mobilenetv2: Inverted residuals and linear bottlenecks. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (CVPR), pp 4510–4520
Szegedy C, Vanhoucke V, Ioffe S, Shlens J, Wojna Z (2016) Rethinking the inception architecture for computer vision, In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (CVPR), pp 2818–2826
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. This work was supported by the National Key Research & Development Project of China (2020YFB1313701), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.62003309), Science & Technology Research Project in Henan Province of China (No.202102210098), and Outstanding Foreign Scientist Support Project in Henan Province of China (No. GZS2019008).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Yang, L., Fan, J., Song, S. et al. A light defect detection algorithm of power insulators from aerial images for power inspection. Neural Comput & Applic 34, 17951–17961 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-022-07437-5
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-022-07437-5