Image recognition of wind turbine blade damage based on a deep learning model with transfer learning and an ensemble learning classifier

Abstract

An image recognition model based on a deep learning network is proposed for the automatic extraction of image features and the accurate and efficient detection of wind turbine blade damage. The Otsu threshold segmentation method is used to segment the blade image to eliminate the influence of the image background on the detection task. In order to improve the recognition performance of the proposed deep learning model, transfer learning and an ensemble learning classifier are used in a convolutional neural network model. Transfer learning is used to enhance the ability of the proposed model to extract abstract features and accelerate the convergence efficiency, whereas the random forest-based ensemble learning classifier is used to improve the accuracy of detecting the blade defects. The performance of the proposed model is verified by using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images of the wind turbine blades. The proposed model provided better performance than the support vector machine (SVM) method, the basic deep learning model and the deep learning model combined with the ensemble learning approach.