Application of Thermography and Adversarial Reconstruction Anomaly Detection in Power Cast-Resin Transformer

Abstract

Dry-type power transformers play a critical role in the power system. Detecting various overheating faults in the running state of the power transformer is necessary to avoid the collapse of the power system. In this paper, we propose a novel deep variational autoencoder-based anomaly detection method to recognize the overheating position in the operation of the dry-type transformer. Firstly, the thermal images of the transformer are acquired by the thermal camera and collected for training and testing datasets. Next, the variational autoencoder-based generative adversarial networks are trained to generate the normal images with different running conditions from heavy to light loading. Through the pixel-wise cosine difference between original and reconstructed images, the residual images with faulty features are obtained. Finally, we evaluate the trained model and anomaly detection method on normal and abnormal testing images to demonstrate the effeteness and performance of the proposed work. The results show that our method effectively improves the anomaly accuracy, AUROC, F1-scores and average precision, which is more effective than other anomaly detection methods. The proposed method is simple, lightweight and has less storage size. It reveals great advantages for practical applications.

CECvT: Initial Diagnosis of Anomalies in Thermal Images

“…When employing the generative adversarial network (GAN) to prevent power system collapse, it is essential to detect various overheating defects in the operational states of the power transformers that play crucial roles in the system. Here, GAN was utilized to recognize and diagnose the overheating locations during transformer operation [23].…”