Detection of Mechanical Defects of High Voltage Circuit Breaker based on Improved Edge Detection and Deep Learning Algorithms

As the high voltage circuit breaker works, the metal parts are prone to many types of mechanical defects, such as plastic deformation, metal loss, corrosion, and so on. The defects will inevitably decrease the performance, mechanical reliability, lifetime, and other critical parameters of the breaker. Therefore, the detection of mechanical defects is of great help to reduce the mechanical failure rate of circuit breakers. In the present paper, a novel method based on edge detection and deep learning is proposed to detect the mechanical defects of the high voltage circuit breaker. Firstly, the high resolution images of the circuit breaker are photographed, and the components in the images are segmented in the minimum range by the contour detection algorithm. After binarization and morphological processing of the segmented images, the edge is drawn with the improved edge detection algorithm. However, the components of the circuit breaker are complicated, which results that the edge features of the critical component are difficult to extract. Then, the specific contour of components is detected by the depth estimation and segmentation methods. Secondly, a deep learning platform base on Tensorflow is established, which is an optimization method based on Convolutional Neural Network. In order to enhance the feature extraction capacity, a convolution kernel is inputted into a sparse self-coding network to proceeds with the optimal pre-training. Based on the above method, the features of images are automatically learned, and each convolution carries for the equilibrium of image entropy of convolution kernel by introducing similarity constraint rule. Finally, 3 types of mechanical defects, including plastic deformation, metal loss, corrosion, images and non-defect images as input are exploited to validate the CNN with convolution kernel optimized. The experimental results show that the average accuracy of the approach is better than the traditional convolution neural network model and has good feature extraction ability and generalization ability. In conclusion, combined with the improved edge detection and deep learning algorithms, the detection of typical mechanical defects can be well performed. For the collected images of circuit breaker, so as to reduce the impact of noise on defect accuracy of mechanical, the proposed method provides a reference for the non-destructive mechanical defect detection of high voltage circuit breaker.