A Novel Transmission Line Insulator Detection Method Based on Enhanced YOLO Model

Aerial photography patrol has become the main method of electric power patrol on transmission lines instead of manual patrol, and the integrity of insulators on transmission lines directly affects the power supply reliability. Under the interference of complex background, traditional insulator detection method tends to have a low ability to perform the detection tasks. To solve this problem, we proposed a new method based on enhanced YOLOv4. Based on watershed algorithm and data augmentation combinations, the problem of accurate image detection of aerial photo insulator is studied. Combined with the watershed algorithm and data augmentation combinations, the enhanced YOLO model has robust ability against different distances, various lighting conditions in complex environments. It is shown that our proposed method achieved competitive performance in the experiments.