A Novel Application of Deep Belief Networks in Learning Partial Discharge Patterns for Classifying Corona, Surface, and Internal Discharges

This paper introduces a new application of deep belief network (DBN) as an emerging artificial neural network for recognizing and classifying different partial discharge (PD) patterns. Phase resolved PD (PRPD) technique with different window intervals is used to manipulate three PD types, including corona, surface, and internal discharges measured in a high-voltage lab. Four approaches are proposed for extracting features from the raw measured data. In the first approach, the DBN is used as both a feature extractor and a PD classifier. The other three approaches extract discriminatory features using statistical and vector-norm-based operators to train a DBN classifier. The impact of the various phase windows through the PRPD method on the performance of the trained classifier is evaluated to obtain the best window interval. It is shown that the deep architectures are capable of learning important distinguishable features from PD data without any data preprocessing. This eliminates time-consuming feature extraction processes that produce the handcrafted features. Based on a comparison analysis, when the input data are corrupted by noise levels or no feature extraction technique is used to preprocess the data, the proposed approach outperforms other techniques, such as artificial neural networks, fuzzy logic classifiers, and support vector machines.