Power Insulator Defect Detection Method Based on Enhanced YOLOV7 for Aerial Inspection

Abstract

As a principal insulating component in power transmission systems, the integrity of the insulator is of paramount importance for ensuring the safe and reliable operation of transmission lines. While the deployment of aerial photography technology has markedly enhanced the efficacy of power facility inspections, the intricate backgrounds, multifarious viewpoint alterations, and erratic lighting circumstances inherent in the captured images present novel challenges for the algorithmic detection of insulator defects. To address these issues, this study proposes an enhanced version of the YOLOV7 detection algorithm. The introduction of the contextual transformer network (CoTNet) structure and an EMA attention mechanism enhances the model’s capacity to perceive global contextual information in images and to model long-distance feature dependencies. Experiments based on a real aerial photography dataset demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the benchmark model in all key performance indicators, including accuracy, recall, and F1 score, which improved by 0.6%, 1.8%, and 0.8%, respectively. Additionally, the average precision (mAP@[0.5]) and mAP@[0.5:0.95] improved by 0.6% and 4.4%, respectively. The superiority of the algorithm in feature extraction and target localization is verified through Grad-CAM visual analysis, which provides a high-precision detection method for intelligent inspection of power transmission systems.

Topics & Concepts