Consistency-based Semi-supervised Learning Framework for Power Line Insulators Detection

Abstract

Abstract It is commonly believed that fast and accurate object detection is the prerequisite for power line insulators automatic fault diagnosis. While the insulators detection task requires a huge number of labeled images to guarantee its performance, placing bounding boxes for every object in each image is time-consuming and requires professional knowledge. To alleviate this problem, we propose CASD, a two-stage semi-supervised learning framework for power line insulators detection based on consistency regularization and data augmentation. Firstly, we train a teacher model on labeled images, then generate pseudo labels for unlabeled images using the trained model, and the confidence-based thresholding is introduced to control the quality of pseudo labels. In the second stage, we apply strong data augmentation to unlabeled images and use both the labeled and unlabeled images to train the CASD. Consistency regularization is introduced in the calculation of unsupervised loss to improve the accuracy and robustness of the model. Finally, we compare CASD with supervised learning, data augmentation and self-training methods on insulators aerial image dataset. The results show that the proposed method performs better than all the three baseline methods, and the detection accuracy of CASD is far better than the supervised learning method in the case of less available images. The comparison results further prove the efficacy of the proposed method.