Weather-Domain Transfer-Based Attention YOLO for Multi-Domain Insulator Defect Detection and Classification in UAV Images

Insulator defect detection of transmission line insulators is an important task for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) inspection, which is of immense importance in ensuring the stable operation of transmission lines. Transmission line insulators exist in complex weather scenarios, with small and inconsistent shapes. These insulators under various weather conditions could result in low-quality images captured, limited data numbers, and imbalanced sample problems. Traditional detection methods often struggle to accurately identify defect information, resulting in missed or false detections in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a weather domain synthesis network for extracting cross-modality discriminative information on multi-domain insulator defect detection and classification tasks. Firstly, we design a novel weather domain synthesis (WDSt) module to convert various weather-conditioned insulator images to the uniform weather domain to decrease the existing domain gap. To further improve the detection performance, we leverage the attention mechanism to construct the Cross-modality Information Attention YOLO (CIA-YOLO) model to improve the detection capability for insulator defects. Here, we fuse both shallow and deep feature maps by adding the extra object detection layer, increasing the accuracy for detecting small targets. The experimental results prove the proposed Cross-modality Information Attention YOLO with the weather domain synthesis algorithm can achieve superior performance in multi-domain insulator datasets (MD-Insulator). Moreover, the proposed algorithm also gives a new perspective for decreasing the multi-domain insulator modality gap with weather-domain transfer, which can inspire more researchers to focus on the field.

Efficient Cross-Modality Insulator Augmentation for Multi-Domain Insulator Defect Detection in UAV Images

Regular inspection of the insulator operating status is essential to ensure the safe and stable operation of the power system. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) inspection has played an important role in transmission line inspection, replacing former manual inspection. With the development of deep learning technologies, deep learning-based insulator defect detection methods have drawn more and more attention and gained great improvement. However, former insulator defect detection methods mostly focus on designing complex refined network architecture, which will increase inference complexity in real applications. In this paper, we propose a novel efficient cross-modality insulator augmentation algorithm for multi-domain insulator defect detection to mimic real complex scenarios. It also alleviates the overfitting problem without adding the inference resources. The high-resolution insulator cross-modality translation (HICT) module is designed to generate multi-modality insulator images with rich texture information to eliminate the adverse effects of existing modality discrepancy. We propose the multi-domain insulator multi-scale spatial augmentation (MMA) module to simultaneously augment multi-domain insulator images with different spatial scales and leverage these fused images and location information to help the target model locate defects with various scales more accurately. Experimental results prove that the proposed cross-modality insulator augmentation algorithm can achieve superior performance in public UPID and SFID insulator defect datasets. Moreover, the proposed algorithm also gives a new perspective for improving insulator defect detection precision without adding inference resources, which is of great significance for advancing the detection of transmission lines.

Research on Insulator Defect Detection Based on an Improved MobilenetV1-YOLOv4

Insulator devices are important for transmission lines, and defects such as insulator bursting and string loss affect the safety of transmission lines. In this study, we aim to investigate the problems of slow detection speed and low efficiency of traditional insulator defect detection algorithms, and to improve the accuracy of insulator fault identification and the convenience of daily work; therefore, we propose an insulator defect detection algorithm based on an improved MobilenetV1-YOLOv4. First, the backbone feature extraction network of YOLOv4 'Backbone' is replaced with the lightweight module Mobilenet-V1. Second, the scSE attention mechanism is introduced in stages of preliminary feature extraction and enhanced feature extraction, sequentially. Finally, the depthwise separable convolution substitutes the 3 × 3 convolution of the enhanced feature extraction network to reduce the overall number of network parameters. The experimental results show that the weight of the improved algorithm is 57.9 MB, which is 62.6% less than that obtained by the MobilenetV1-YOLOv4 model; the average accuracy of insulator defect detection is improved by 0.26% and reaches 98.81%; and the detection speed reaches 190 frames per second with an increase of 37 frames per second.

Multi-Geometric Reasoning Network for Insulator Defect Detection of Electric Transmission Lines

To address the challenges in the unmanned system-based intelligent inspection of electric transmission line insulators, this paper proposed a multi-geometric reasoning network (MGRN) to accurately detect insulator geometric defects based on aerial images with complex backgrounds and different scales. The spatial geometric reasoning sub-module (SGR) was developed to represent the spatial location relationship of defects. The appearance geometric reasoning sub-module (AGR) and the parallel feature transformation (PFT) sub-module were adopted to obtain the appearance geometric features from the real samples. These multi-geometric features can be fused with the original visual features to identify and locate the insulator defects. The proposed solution is assessed through experiments against the existing solutions and the numerical results indicate that it can significantly improve the detection accuracy of multiple insulator defects using the aerial images.