Insulator Defect Detection Based on YOLOv4-tiny with Improved Feature Fusion

Abstract

Insulator exposed to a wild environment for long-term running usually suffers from the damage of natural calamities that makes them become one of the most fragile components in the whole power system. In this case, even a slight fault will seriously affect the power supply safety of the power grid. Therefore, it is critical to find and identify the faulty insulator efficiently and accurately. However, an insulator is quite a small component in comparison with a huge power system which makes it hard to visible with naked eyes. This characteristic leads to poor recognition accuracy for existing detection methods. In order to solve the above problems, we propose an insulator defect detection algorithm based on an improved YOLOv4-tiny model. It differs from existing insulator detection models, our algorithm applies the effective channel attention network to the feature extraction network of YOLOv4-tiny, which significantly enhances the feature extraction ability of the backbone network. These two-way features of the pyramid can be fully fused in the two-way feature fusion stages seamlessly. Experimental results show that compared with, our proposed algorithm outperforms Faster RCNN and YOLOv3 in average classification accuracy, missed detection, and false detection.