An Improved Insulator and Spacer Detection Algorithm Based on Dual Network and SSD

Abstract

The traditional manual inspection is gradually replaced by the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) automatic inspection. However, due to the limited computational resources carried by the UAV, the existing deep learning-based algorithm needs a large amount of computational resources, which makes it impossible to realize the online detection. Moreover, there is no effective online detection system at present. To realize the high-precision online detection of electrical equipment, this paper proposes an SSD (Single Shot Multibox Detector) detection algorithm based on the improved Dual network for the images of insulators and spacers taken by UAVs. The proposed algorithm uses MnasNet and MobileNetv3 to form the Dual network to extract multi-level features, which overcomes the shortcoming of single convolutional network-based backbone for feature extraction. Then the features extracted from the two networks are fused together to obtain the features with high-level semantic information. Finally, the proposed algorithm is tested on the public dataset of the insulator and spacer. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can detect insulators and spacers efficiently. Compared with other methods, the proposed algorithm has the advantages of smaller model size and higher accuracy. The object detection accuracy of the proposed method is up to 95.1%.