Insulators are crucial insulation components and structural supports in power grids, playing a vital role in the transmission lines. Due to temperature fluctuations, internal stress, or damage from hail, insulators are prone to injury. Automatic detection of damaged insulators faces challenges such as diverse types, small defect targets, and complex backgrounds and shapes. Most research for detecting insulator defects has focused on a single defect type or a specific material. However, the insulators in the grid's transmission lines have different colors and materials. Various insulator defects coexist, and the existing methods have difficulty meeting the practical application requirements. Current methods suffer from low detection accuracy and mAP0.5 cannot meet application requirements. This paper proposes an improved YOLOv7 model for multi-type insulator defect detection. First, our model replaces the SPPCSPC module with the RFB module to enhance the network's feature extraction capability. Second, a CA mechanism is introduced into the head part to enhance the network's feature representation ability and to improve detection accuracy. Third, a WIoU loss function is employed to address the low-quality samples hindering model generalization during training, thereby improving the model's overall performance. The experimental results indicate that the proposed model exhibits enhancements across various performance metrics. Specifically, there is a 1.6% advancement in mAP_0.5, a corresponding 1.6% enhancement in mAP_0.5:0.95, a 1.3% elevation in precision, and a 1% increase in recall. Moreover, the model achieves parameter reduction by 3.2 million, leading to a decrease of 2.5 GFLOPS in computational cost. Notably, there is also an improvement of 2.81 milliseconds in single-image detection speed.
Existing detection methods for insulator defect identification from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) struggle with complex background scenes and small objects, leading to suboptimal accuracy and a high number of false positives detection. Using the concept of local attention modeling, this paper proposes a new attention-based foundation architecture, YOLO-ELA, to address this issue. The Efficient Local Attention (ELA) blocks were added into the neck part of the one-stage YOLOv8 architecture to shift the model's attention from background features towards features of insulators with defects. The SCYLLA Intersection-Over-Union (SIoU) criterion function was used to reduce detection loss, accelerate model convergence, and increase the model's sensitivity towards small insulator defects, yielding higher true positive outcomes. Due to a limited dataset, data augmentation techniques were utilized to increase the diversity of the dataset. In addition, we leveraged the transfer learning strategy to improve the model's performance. Experimental results on high-resolution UAV images show that our method achieved a state-of-the-art performance of 96.9% mAP0.5 and a real-time detection speed of 74.63 frames per second, outperforming the baseline model. This further demonstrates the effectiveness of attention-based convolutional neural networks (CNN) in object detection tasks.
In order to achieve real-time detection of insulator defects in transmission lines, this paper proposes an improved insulator defect detection algorithm based on the YOLOv5s model, named IDD-YOLOv5. Firstly, to enhance the detection speed and reduce the model size, we introduce the GhostConv module and C3Ghost module into the backbone network. Secondly, the neck network employs a combination of C3Ghost and GSConv to further reduce the model’s parameter count, combined with the adaptive upsampling operator CARAFE to improve model accuracy. Finally, we adopt the EIOU loss function to accelerate model convergence and enhance detection precision. Experimental results show that IDD-YOLOv5 improves the [email omitted] by 2.5% over the original YOLOv5s, with accuracy and recall also increasing by 1.9% and 2.5%, respectively, while reducing parameters by 45.54%. Therefore, this improved model can rapidly and accurately detect insulator defects, aiding in the stable operation of electrical equipment. The related code, dataset, and model can be accessed through the following link: https://github.com/LuYang-2023/ICMA2024.git.
Insulator defect detection is of great significance to ensure the normal operation of power transmission and distribution networks. In response to the problems of low speed, low accuracy, and difficulty in deploying to embedded terminals in existing insulator defect detection, this paper proposes a lightweight insulator defect detection model based on an improved YOLOv5s, named LiteYOLO-ID. Firstly, to significantly reduce the model parameters while maintaining detection accuracy, we design a new lightweight convolution module called EGC (ECA-GhostNet-C2f). Secondly, based on the EGC module, we construct the EGC-CSPGhostNet backbone network, which optimizes the feature extraction process and achieves model compression. Additionally, we design a lightweight neck network, EGC-PANet, to further reduce the parameter count and achieve efficient feature fusion. Experimental results show that on the IDID-Plus dataset, compared to the original YOLOv5s model, not only does LiteYOLO-ID reduce the model parameters by 47.13\%, but it also improves the mAP(0.5) by 1\%. Furthermore, the generalization of the model is validated on the Pascal VOC dataset and the SFID dataset. Importantly, after TensorRT optimization, the inference speed of the LiteYOLO-ID algorithm on the Jetson TX2 NX reaches 20.2 FPS, meeting the real-time detection requirements of insulator defects. Our code, weight models, and datasets can be obtained at the following URL: https://github.com/LuYang-2023/Insulator-defect-detection.