Online detection of snowcoverage and swing angles of electrical insulators on power transmission lines using videos

A potential fatal problem for electrical power delivery through power lines in Northern countries is when snow or ice accumulates on electrical insulators. This could lead to snow or ice-induced outages and voltage collapse, causing huge economic loss. Further, large swing angles due to wind may cause short circuits. This paper presents a novel video surveillance system for detecting snow coverage on electric insulators and swing angles of insulators using videos from a remote outdoor 420 kV power transmission line. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first insulator snow surveillance system base on automatic image analysis techniques. We propose using hybrid techniques by combining histograms, boundaries and template cross-correlations for analyzing a broad range of scenarios caused by changing weather and lighting conditions. Experiments on videos captured during several month periods have shown promising and valuable estimation results. For image pixels related to snow on insulators, our system has yielded an average detection rate of 93% for good quality images and 67.6% for poor quality images, and a corresponding average false alarm of 9% and 18.1%.