InsuDet: A Fault Detection Method for Insulators of Overhead Transmission Lines Using Convolutional Neural Networks

One of the key tasks of the overhead line power equipment inspection based on aerial images acquired by unmanned aerial vehicles is to determine whether the insulators are faulty. However, the fault area on the insulator string occupies a relatively small portion of the entire image, which will make detection difficult. This article presents an intelligent fault detection method for overhead line insulators based on aerial images and improved you only look once (YOLOv3) deep learning technology. In our model, a densely connected feature pyramid network (FPN) is proposed. First, this network can improve the utilization rate of the strong semantic information of deep features and the localization information of shallow features, thereby improving the small insulator fault (missing-cap) detection performance of the YOLOv3 model. Second, this network reduces the number of parameters of the YOLOv3 model, resulting in a low risk of network over-fitting for small datasets. The experimental results on the CPLID dataset show that our model has higher detection accuracy in localization of overhead line insulators and detection of insulator missing-cap faults compared with the existing works.