Electrical Equipment Identification Method With Synthetic Data Using Edge-Oriented Generative Adversarial Network

The fourth industrial revolution - Industry 4.0 - puts emphasis on the application of intelligent technologies in the area of monitoring and identification of electrical equipment. High precision and non-contact qualities make the infrared thermography one of the most suitable technologies for intelligent inspection of high-voltage apparatus. Yet, due to imperfect data acquisition methods and difficulties in collecting data, electrical equipment images are limited in quantities and imbalanced in representing different types of devices. Additionally, it is not easy to extract representative features of infrared images due to their low-intensity contrast and uneven distribution. In this paper, a data-driven framework is proposed for the identification of electrical equipment based on infrared images. The main technique of this proposed system is a novel process of generating synthetic infrared images. For this purpose, an Edge-Oriented Generative Adversarial Network (EOGAN) is developed. The EOGAN is designed to create realistic infrared images that can be used as augmented data for developing data-driven identification methods. Extracted edge features of electrical equipment are utilized as prior information to guide the process of generating realistic infrared images. Finally, comparative experiments are carried out to show the effectiveness of the proposed EOGAN-based framework for equipment identification in the presence of limited and imbalanced image datasets.