Recognition of Vibration Dampers Based on Deep Learning Method in UAV Images

As one of electrical components in transmission lines, vibration damper plays a role in preventing the power lines dancing, and its recognition is an important task for intelligent inspection. However, due to the complex background interference in aerial images, current deep learning algorithms for vibration damper detection often lack accuracy and robustness. To achieve vibration damper detection more accurately, in this study, improved You Only Look Once (YOLO) model is proposed for performing damper detection. Firstly, a damper dataset containing 1900 samples with different scenarios was created. Secondly, the backbone network of YOLOv4 was improved by combining the Res2Net module and Dense blocks, reducing computational consumption and improving training speed. Then, an improved path aggregation network (PANet) structure was introduced in YOLOv4, combined with top-down and bottom-up feature fusion strategies to achieve feature enhancement. Finally, the proposed YOLO model and comparative model were trained and tested on the damper dataset. The experimental results and analysis indicate that the proposed model is more effective and robust than the comparative models. More importantly, the average precision (AP) of this model can reach 98.8%, which is 6.2% higher than that of original YOLOv4 model; and the prediction speed of this model is 62 frames per second (FPS), which is 5 FPS faster than that of YOLOv4 model.