An Assembled Detector Based on Geometrical Constraint for Power Component Recognition

The intelligent inspection of power lines and other difficult-to-access structures and facilities has been greatly enhanced by the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), which allow inspection in a safe, efficient, and high-quality fashion. This paper analyzes the characteristics of a scene contain...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zheng Ji, Yifan Liao, Li Zheng, Liang Wu, Manzhu Yu, Yanjie Feng
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2019-08-01
Series:Sensors
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/19/16/3517
Description
Summary:The intelligent inspection of power lines and other difficult-to-access structures and facilities has been greatly enhanced by the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), which allow inspection in a safe, efficient, and high-quality fashion. This paper analyzes the characteristics of a scene containing power equipment and the operation mode of UAVs. A low-cost virtual scene is created, and a training sample for the power-line components is generated quickly. Taking a vibration-damper as the main object, an assembled detector based on geometrical constraint (ADGC) is proposed and is used to analyze the virtual dataset. The geometric positional relationship is used as the constraint, and the Faster Region with Convolutional Neural Network (R-CNN), Deformable Part Model (DPM), and Haar cascade classifiers are combined, which allows the features of different classifiers, such as contour, shape, and texture to be fully used. By combining the characteristics of virtual data and real data using UAV images, the power components are detected by the ADGC. The result produced by the detector with relatively good performance can help expand the training set and achieve a better detection model. Moreover, this method can be smoothly transferred to other power-line facilities and other power-line scenarios.
ISSN:1424-8220