A Fault Detection Method for Power Transmission Lines Using Aerial Images

It is necessary to regularly detect faults to maintain the safety and stability of power lines. Insulators are one of the important electrical components in high-voltage transmission lines. It is extremely necessary to check the working status of insulators regularly. Traditional manual inspection is inefficient because it requires a significant amount of labor costs. In this paper, a method for detecting insulators' missing defect based on aerial images is proposed to address the issue by unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Firstly, the improved Faster R-CNN (region-based convolutional neural network) is used to identify and locate insulators in aerial images. Secondly, the U-Net image segmentation network segments insulators from the images. The adaptive threshold segmentation method completely separates the insulator from the background. Then the binary image of the insulator is obtained. Finally, the binary image is converted into a fault curve which is used for determining the missing insulators based on the distribution of the fault curve. By using collected insulator datasets on a 330kV overhead transmission line using a DJI M300 UAV platform and an onboard H20T camera/sensor, the detection accuracy of glass insulators is as high as 0.98 with the proposed algorithm. The positioning accuracy of the proposed algorithm is also higher than other algorithms. This method has high detection accuracy for missing defects in insulators. The experimental results show that compared with similar algorithms, this method has higher accuracy and efficiency.