An active contour approach to insulator segmentation

Faulty insulator causes the change of voltage and electric current, which generates great damage in power grid. It is therefore important to monitor and inspect the insulator to assess damage that could be caused by aging or any accident on power line system. Computer vision has been identified and is being investigated as a tool to solve this problem more safely, accurately and speedily. Identifying the region where the insulator is located is crucial in the process of assessing its status. The insulator can then be segmented and fed to defect detector. In this paper we proposed an insulator segmentation framework from plain and complex background using active contour model and extracting insulator region of interest. Experiment shows that active contour model successfully segment insulators from a plain and complex background by evaluating the result with a manually created ground-truth. This method is more efficient, flexible, and outperforms the classical methods such as thresholding and gradients based approach.