Bird's nest defect detection of transmission lines based on domain knowledge and occlusion reasoning

Abstract

AbstractBird's nest defect is an important cause of transmission line faults. To achieve accurate detection of bird nest defects in complex scenarios, a bird nest defect detection model for transmission lines was proposed that combines domain knowledge and occlusion reasoning networks. On the one hand, the model utilized the domain knowledge of the location of the bird's nest, using edge detection to obtain tower area information to constrain the location of candidate frames. This helps to reduce the false detection caused by complex backgrounds. On the other hand, on the basis of analyzing the occlusion characteristics of bird nests, the model employed occlusion reasoning networks that randomly erase features at the feature level to simulate the occlusion of bird nests in real scenes and improve the model's detection capability for occluded targets. Additionally, a multi‐scale feature fusion algorithm was designed in this paper to adapt the model to the scale variations of bird nests in aerial images. Experimental results demonstrate that the model outperforms advanced target detection models and other bird nest defect detection methods, with an AP50 of 78.8% and an AR10 of 72.4% for defect detection.