Icing-EdgeNet: A Pruning Lightweight Edge Intelligent Method of Discriminative Driving Channel for Ice Thickness of Transmission Lines

Abstract

The icing monitoring of transmission lines is of great significance to prevent freezing disasters of transmission lines and ensure the security and stability of power system. Measurement methods based on image recognition is gradually applied for icing monitoring but fails to distinguish the icing thickness under the extreme meteorological conditions. Therefore, this article built an ice monitoring system based on edge intelligence to achieve the ice thickness identification at the icing monitoring terminal and proposed a lightweight vision identification method based on discriminative-driven channel pruning for icing monitoring terminals with limited computing resources. In this method, the lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) MobileNetV3 is utilized for feature extraction, and the multiscale target detection network SSD is used to extract the high-dimensional feature information for ice monitoring. Then, the channel pruning driven by discrimination is used to further compress model, so as to obtain a lightweight identification method suitable for ice monitoring terminals with limited resources. The effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method are verified in comparison with other CNN-based target detection methods and traditional ice monitoring methods. The experimental results showed that the proposed method has 74.5% recognition accuracy for the ice images collected under extreme meteorological conditions. Moreover, the model size is only 11 MB, which can be deployed in ice thickness monitoring terminals with limited computing resources.