Energies, Vol. 12, Pages 543: Self-Shattering Defect Detection of Glass Insulators Based on Spatial Features (Energies)

During an automatic power transmission line inspection, a large number of images are collected by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to detect existing defects in transmission line components, especially insulators. However, with twin insulator strings in the inspection images, when the umbrella skirts of the rear string are obstructed by the front string, defect detection becomes difficult. To solve this problem, we propose a method to detect self-shattering defects of insulators based on spatial features contained in images. Firstly, the images are segmented according to the particular color features of glass insulators, and the main axes of insulator strings in the images are adjusted to the horizontal direction. Then, the connected regions of insulators in the images are marked. After that, the vertical lengths of the regions, the number of insulator pixels in the regions, as well as the horizontal distances between two adjacent connected regions are selected as spatial features, based on which defect discriminants are formulated. Finally, experiments are performed using the proposed formula to detect self-shattering defects in the insulators, using the spatial distribution of the connected regions to locate the defects. The experiment results indicate that the proposed method has good detection accuracy and localization precision.