Infrared Image Target Detection of Substation Electrical Equipment Using an Improved Faster R-CNN

Infrared camera can be used to monitor the condition of substation electrical equipment. Fast and accurate target detection algorithm is the key for infrared intelligent on-line routing inspection. However, the performance of traditional detection algorithm is poor due to the complex background of substation. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a target detection model based on the improved faster region-based convolutional neural networks (Faster R-CNN), which can be used for automatic detection of five kinds of electrical equipment in substations. The feature extraction network of this model is improved based on VGG16 by abandoning some high-level convolutions to accelerate the training and testing speed. Meanwhile, the 1:3 and 3:1 aspect ratio of anchor are added to improve the detection accuracy of elongated equipment. Experiments are performed on an infrared image dataset of substation to detect five types of equipment. The robustness tests of our model are carried out, too. The results show that our model performs well in detection accuracy and speed, achieving a mean detected accuracy of 95.32% and running at 11 frame/second. In addition, our model is robust to noise and lightness, which is suitable to other substations. Comparing to other models, our model has the highest mAP@0.5 of 92.78%.