Accurate Object Recognition for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Electric Power Inspection using an Improved YOLOv2 Algorithm

Abstract

With the growing application of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) in the electric power inspection, there is an increasing demand for accurate recognition of power tower components from a large number of pictures and videos. Traditional machine learning methods require feature extraction of, such as edge, color, texture, etc., are not suitable for the complex scene of the UAV electric power inspection. The end-toend object detection algorithm YOLOv2, offers overall high recognition accuracy and speed, but is less so in recognizing small targets . In this study, the YOLOv2 was improved by: 1)adding an additional passthrough layer to the original network to fuse more fine-grained features to improve the recognition capability for small targets, and 2) removing the redundant convolutional layers and reducing the number of the filters in the middle convolutional layers to simplify the network structure. The datasets are from Multi-rotor UAV inspection of high voltage transmission lines. Three types of power tower components including the tower, tower base, and signs are selected as recognition targets. Results showed that the mean average precision (mAP) of the improved model for three types of target recognition was increased to 98.19%, higher than that of the original one, and the recognition speed was increased by 35%.