AE-YOLOv5 for Detection of Power Line Insulator Defects

The power transmission network, which delivers power energy from generator to customers, plays an important role in the power grid. Insulator is a basic component in the power transmission network. Its defects may lead to the paralysis of the entire transmission network, resulting in serious electricity accidents. Therefore, how to use artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies to realize automatic detection of power line insulator defects has become an urgent problem to be solved. To accurately detect insulator defects in complex environment, this article proposes Attention Enhanced YOLOv5 (AE-YOLOv5) by inserting visual attention modules into original YOLOv5 model. In particular, we design a Channel-Spatial Attention module and plug it into the backbone of YOLOv5 to enhance its representation learning ability. Furthermore, a Multi-scale Attention module is also proposed to enhance the Feature Pyramid Network (FPN). To validate the efficacy of our proposed model, we conducted training and testing on a dataset collected from real-world scenarios. The experimental results demonstrate that our model can effectively and accurately detect defects of power line insulators in real-time.