Improved YOLOX Foreign Object Detection Algorithm for Transmission Lines

Abstract

It is quite simple for foreign objects to attach themselves to transmission line corridors because of the wide variety of laying and the complex, changing environment. If these foreign objects are not found and removed in a timely manner, they can have a significant impact on the transmission lines’ ability to operate safely. Due to the problem of poor accuracy of foreign object identification in transmission line image inspection, we provide an improved YOLOX technique for detection of foreign objects in transmission lines. The method improves the YOLOX target detection network by first using Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling to increase sensitivity to foreign objects of different scales, then by embedding Convolutional Block Attention Module to increase model recognition accuracy, and finally by using GIoU loss to further optimize. The testing findings show that the enhanced YOLOX network has a mAP improvement of around 4.24% over the baseline YOLOX network. The target detection SSD, Faster R-CNN, YOLOv5, and YOLOV7 networks have improved less than this. The effectiveness and superiority of the algorithm are proven.