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Aerial insulator defect images have some features. For instance, the complex background and small target of defects would make it difficult to detect insulator defects quickly and accurately. To solve the problem of low accuracy of insulator defect detection, this paper concerns the shortcomings of IoU and the sensitivity of small targets to the model regression accuracy. An improved SIoU loss function was proposed based on the regular influence of regression direction on the accuracy. This loss function can accelerate the convergence of the model and make it achieve better results in regressions. For complex backgrounds, ECA (Efficient Channel Attention Module) is embedded between the backbone and the feature fusion layer of the model to reduce the influence of redundant features on the detection accuracy and make progress in the aspect. As a result, these experiments show that the improved model achieved 97.18% mAP which is 2.74% higher than before, and the detection speed could reach 71 fps. To some extent, it can detect insulator and its defects accurately and in real-time.

The accuracy of insulators and their defect identification by UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) in transmission-line inspection needs to be further improved, and the model size of the detection algorithm is significantly reduced to make it more suitable for edge-end deployment. In this paper, the algorithm uses a lightweight GhostNet module to reconstruct the backbone feature extraction network of the YOLOv4 model and employs depthwise separable convolution in the feature fusion layer. The model is lighter on the premise of ensuring the effect of image information extraction. Meanwhile, the ECA-Net channel attention mechanism is embedded into the feature extraction layer and PANet (Path Aggregation Network) to improve the recognition accuracy of the model for small targets. The experimental results show that the size of the improved model is reduced from 244 MB to 42 MB, which is only 17.3% of the original model. At the same time, the mAp of the improved model is 0.77% higher than that of the original model, reaching 95.4%. Moreover, the mAP compared with YOLOv5-s and YOLOX-s, respectively, is improved by 1.98% and 1.29%. Finally, the improved model is deployed into Jetson Xavier NX and run at a speed of 8.8 FPS, which is 4.3 FPS faster than the original model.

Aerial images have complex backgrounds, small targets, and overlapping targets, resulting in low accuracy of intelligent detection of overhead line insulators. This paper proposes an improved algorithm for insulator breakage detection based on YOLOv5: The ECA-Net (Efficient Channel Attention Network) attention mechanism is integrated into its backbone feature extraction layer, and the effective distinction between background and target is achieved by increasing the weight of important channels. A bidirectional feature pyramid network is added to the feature fusion layer, and large-scale images with more original information are combined to effectively retain small target features. Incorporating a flexible detection frame selection algorithm Soft-NMS (Soft Non-Maximum Suppression) into the prediction layer to re-screen the target frame, thereby reducing the probability of mistaken deletion of overlapping targets. The effectiveness of the improved YOLOv5 algorithm is verified in the actual aerial image dataset, and the results show that the mean Average Precision (mAP) of the improved algorithm is 95.02% and the detection speed FPS (Frames Per Second) can reach 49.4 frames/s, which meets the real-time and accuracy requirements of engineering applications.