The early detection of damaged (partially broken) outdoor insulators in primary distribution systems is of paramount importance for continuous electricity supply and public safety. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) present a safer, autonomous, and efficient way to examine the power system components without closing the power distribution system. In this work, a novel dataset is designed by capturing real images using UAVs and manually generated images collected to overcome the data insufficiency problem. A deep Laplacian pyramid-based super-resolution network is implemented to reconstruct high-resolution training images. To improve the visibility of low-light images, a low-light image enhancement technique is used for the robust exposure correction of the training images. A different fine-tuning strategy is implemented for fine-tuning the object detection model to increase detection accuracy for the specific faulty insulators. Several flight path strategies are proposed to overcome the shuttering effect of insulators, along with providing a less complex and time- and energy-efficient approach for capturing a video stream of the power system components. The performance of different object detection models is presented for selecting the most suitable one for fine-tuning on the specific faulty insulator dataset. For the detection of damaged insulators, our proposed method achieved an F1-score of 0.81 and 0.77 on two different datasets and presents a simple and more efficient flight strategy. Our approach is based on real aerial inspection of in-service porcelain insulators by extensive evaluation of several video sequences showing robust fault recognition and diagnostic capabilities. Our approach is demonstrated on data acquired by a drone in Swat, Pakistan.

This paper presents a new methodology based on texture and color for the detection and monitoring of different sources of forest fire smoke using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). A novel dataset has been gathered comprised of thin smoke and dense smoke generated from the dry leaves on the floor of the forest, which is a source of igniting forest fires. A classification task has been done by training a feature extractor to check the feasibility of the proposed dataset. A meta-architecture is trained above the feature extractor to check the dataset viability for smoke detection and tracking. Results have been obtained by implementing the proposed methodology on forest fire smoke images, smoke videos taken on a stand by the camera, and real-time UAV footages. A microaverage F1-score of 0.865 has been achieved with different test videos. An F1-score of 0.870 has been achieved on real UAV footage of wildfire smoke. The structural similarity index has been used to show some of the difficulties encountered in smoke detection, along with examples.

Association rule mining (ARM) is used for discovering frequent itemsets for interesting relationships of associative and correlative behaviors within the data. This gives new insights of great value, both commercial and academic. The traditional ARM techniques discover interesting association rules based on a predefined minimum support threshold. However, there is no known standard of an exact definition of minimum support and providing an inappropriate minimum support value may result in missing important rules. In addition, most of the rules discovered by these traditional ARM techniques refer to already known knowledge. To address these limitations of the minimum support threshold in ARM techniques, this study proposes an algorithm to mine interesting association rules without minimum support using predicate logic and a property of a proposed interestingness measure (g measure). The algorithm scans the database and uses g measure’s property to search for interesting combinations. The selected combinations are mapped to pseudo-implications and inference rules of logic are used on the pseudo-implications to produce and validate the predicate rules. Experimental results of the proposed technique show better performance against state-of-the-art classification techniques, and reliable predicate rules are discovered based on the reliability differences of the presence and absence of the rule’s consequence.

The primary distribution systems are comprised of power lines delivering power to utility feeders from substations. The inspection and maintenance of damaged and broken power system insulators are of paramount importance for continuous power supply and public safety. hence, to identify any faults and defects in advance a periodic inspection of power line insulators and other components be ensured beforehand. To automate the process and reduce operational cost and risk Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are being extensively utilized. As they present a safer and efficient way to examine the power system insulators and their components without closing the power distribution system ensuring continuous supply to the end-users. To achieve these objectives in this work a novel dataset is designed by capturing real images using UAVs and manually generated images collected to overcome the data insufficiency problem. Deep Laplacian pyramids based super-resolution network is implemented to reconstruct high-resolution training images. To improve the visibility of low light images a low light image enhancement technique is used for the robust exposure correction of the training images. Using computer vision-based object detection techniques to identify faults and classify them according to classes they belong. A different fine-tuning strategy is implemented for fine-tuning the object detection model to increase detection accuracy for the specific faulty insulators. To improve the faults detection several flight path strategies are proposed for efficient inspection. Such strategies overcome the shuttering effect of insulators along with providing a less complex, time, and energy-efficient approach for capturing video stream of the power system components. Performance of different object detection models is presented for selecting the suitable one for fine-tuning on the specific faulty insulator dataset. Our proposed approach gives a less complex and more efficient flight strategy along with better results. For defect detection, our proposed method achieved an F1-score of 0.81 and 0.77 on two different datasets. Our approach is based on real aerial inspection of in-service porcelain insulators by extensive evaluation of several video sequences showing robust faults recognition and diagnostic capabilities. Our approach is demonstrated on data acquired by a drone in Swat Pakistan.

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