A Deep Learning Method to Detect Foreign Objects for Inspecting Power Transmission Lines

Image online monitoring technology has been widely used in transmission lines inspection, but the intelligent and efficient foreign object detection still has a gap with the ideal. In this paper, we propose a deep learning method to detect invading foreign objects for power transmission line inspection. Specifically, we design our network based on the regression strategy with oriented bounding boxes to accurately predict spatial location and orientation angle of foreign objects, as well as their categories in cluttered backgrounds. Moreover, an easy yet effective Scale Histogram Matching method is proposed to be applied to the publicly available dataset, allowing useful patterns to be exploited to detect tiny foreign objects during the pretraining procedure and boosting detection performance even with limited annotated samples. Besides, we construct an image dataset that contains common foreign objects in transmission line scenarios to evaluate proposed methods, on which experiment results show our full model achieves accuracy with 88.1% mean Average Precision (mAP). Additionally, the efficient and compact network structure allows our network to run in real-time, which provides possibilities for practical use.