The High-Precision Detection Method for Insulators’ Self-Explosion Defect Based on the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle with Improved Lightweight ECA-YOLOX-Tiny Model

Abstract

Aiming at the application of the overhead transmission line insulator patrol inspection requirements based on the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), a lightweight ECA-YOLOX-Tiny model is proposed by embedding the efficient channel attention (ECA) module into the lightweight YOLOX-Tiny model. Some measures of data augmentation, input image resolution improvement and adaptive cosine annealing learning rate are used to improve the target detection accuracy. The data of the standard China power line insulator dataset (CPLID) are used to train and verify the model. Through a longitudinal comparison before and after the model improved, and a cross-sectional comparison with other similar models, the advantages of the proposed model are verified in terms of multi-target identification for normal insulators, localization for small target defect areas, and the parameters required for calculation. Finally, the comparative analysis between the proposed ECA-YOLOX-Tiny model and YOLOV4-Tiny model is given by introducing the visualization method of class activation mapping (CAM). The comparative results show that the ECA-YOLOX-Tiny model is more accurate in locating the self-explosion areas of defective insulators, and has a higher response rate for decision areas and some special backgrounds, such as the overlapping small target insulators, the insulators obscured by tower poles, or the insulators with high-similarity backgrounds.