Finding out the wind deviation fault of the insulators of transmission lines in time can not only help people better complete the wind bias warning and prevention work, but also reduce the economic loss and the maintenance difficulty. A technology of Actual Wind Deviation Monitoring for Suspension Insulator Strings Based on Improved Edge Detection is proposed in this paper. It can calculate the actual wind deviation angle and distance of the insulator through image processing technology and camera calibration. Firstly, the video monitoring device is installed on the tower to collect the field insulator images, and the R + G improved grayscale processing and median filtering are carried out. Secondly, two-dimensional Otsu threshold segmentation is applied to the pre-processed image, and the insulator string target is obtained by combining morphological filtering and connection domain extraction. Then, the improved Kirsch operator is used to obtain the complete single-pixel wide edge of the insulator string. Searching the left and right boundary points of each insulator separately and the center points of each insulator can be calculated. Finally, these center points are transformed into world coordinates by camera calibration and fitted by least square method (LSM). The deviation angle θ of the insulator string can be obtained according to the slope of the fitting line, and the deviation distance d according to the length of the insulator string. When θ is greater than 7.5 • and d is greater than 300mm, an alarm is issued to alert the staff. We analyze the performance of the technology by a series of experiments, the maximum error between the proposed method and the manual method is 8.72% and the minimum is 1.01%. Moreover, by analyzing 200 field insulator images, the identification accuracy are 93.75% and 91.36% respectively, which shows that the proposed method is effective and practical. It provides a new idea for the wind deviation monitoring of suspension insulator strings. INDEX TERMS Insulator wind deviation, improved gray processing, improved Kirsch operator, camera calibration, deviation angle and distance.