Multi-patch deep features for power line insulator status classification from aerial images

The status of the insulators in power line can directly affect the reliability of the power transmission systems. Computer vision aided approaches have been widely applied in electric power systems. Inspecting the status of insulators from aerial images has been challenging due to the complex background and rapid view changing under different illumination conditions. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to inspect the insulators with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). A CNN model with multi-patch feature extraction method is applied to represent the status of insulators and a Support Vector Machine (SVM) is trained based on these features. A thorough evaluation is conducted on our insulator status dataset of six classes from real inspection videos. The experimental results show that a pre-trained model for classification is more accurate than the shallow features by hand-crafted. Our approach achieves 98.7095% mean Average Precision (mAP) in status classification. We also study the behavior of the neural activations of the convolutional layers. Different results vary with different fully connected layers, and interesting findings are discussed.