Insulator and Burst Fault Detection Using an Improved Yolov3 Algorithm

Insulators play an important role in the operation of outdoor high-voltage transmission lines. However, insulators are installed in outdoor environments for long periods and thus failures are inevitable. It is necessary to conduct timely insulator inspection and maintenance. In this paper, an improved Yolov3 target detection network (Yolov3-CK) is proposed in order to achieve higher detection accuracy and speed. First, Yolov3-CK uses the CIOU loss function instead of the mean square error loss function from Yolov3. Second, the Yolov3-CK model uses cluster analysis of the priori box via the k -means++ algorithm to obtain a priori box size that is more suitable for the detection of insulators and their burst faults. Finally, we use a dataset obtained by performing data enhancement on the China power line insulator dataset to train and test the data-enhanced Yolov3-CK model. The mean precision of Yolov3-CK reaches 91.67% with 47.9 frames processed per second. Yolov3-CK provides better detection accuracy and a higher processing rate than Faster RCNN, SSD, and Yolov3. Therefore, the Yolov3-CK model is more suitable for the detection of insulators and their burst faults.