Attention-Guided Multitask Convolutional Neural Network for Power Line Parts Detection

Abstract

Power line parts detection refers to the inspection of key parts on transmission lines against the complex background in aerial images and identifying whether exist anomalies that cause transmission failure. Obviously, this process plays a pivotal role in ensuring the safety of power transmission. Most of the existing methods are based on deep convolutional neural networks. However, the complexity and variability of the aerial image background and the problem of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) shooting perspective and distance pose a challenge for previous works. This study aims to improve the detection accuracy of the model and propose an attention-guided multitask convolutional neural network (AGMNet). First, to enhance the feature representation of objects in aerial images, we construct spatial region attention blocks that are suitable for object detection. It can be inserted into any existing convolutional backbone network. Due to its efficient feature tensor computation method, the network can obtain competitive results with less computational memory. Second, we introduce a multitask framework that creatively considers the identification of rust levels and abnormal conditions of power line components, which has not been considered in previous works. Finally, we incorporate the refinable region proposal network (RPN) structure and multiscale training strategy to improve the robustness of the network. The experimental results on the testing datasets show that the proposed AGMNet can recognize the power parts (dampers and suspension clamps) with a mean average precision (mAP) of 95.3% and simultaneously identify their rust levels with an mAP of 75.4% and abnormal conditions with an mAP of 92.7%.