Damage Detection of Insulators in Catenary Based on Deep Learning and Zernike Moment Algorithms

The intelligent damage detection of catenary insulators is one of the key steps in maintaining the safe and stable operation of railway traction power supply systems. However, traditional deep learning algorithms need to train a large number of images with damage features, which are hard to obtain; and feature-matching algorithms have limitations in anti-complex background interference, affecting the accuracy of damage detection. The current work proposes a method that combines deep learning and Zernike moment algorithms. The Mask R-CNN algorithm is firstly used to identify the catenary insulators to realize the region proposal of the insulators. After image preprocessing, the Zernike moment algorithm is used to replace the existing Hu moment algorithm to extract more detailed insulator contour features, then the similarity value and its standard deviation are further calculated, so as to complete the damage detection of the catenary insulator. The experimental results show that the mean average precision of insulator identification can reach 96.4%, and the Zernike moment algorithm has an accuracy of 93.36% in judging the damage of insulators. Compared with the existing Hu moment algorithm, the accuracy is increased by 10.94%, which provides a new method for the automatic detection of damaged insulators in catenary and even other scenarios.