Relay protection devices are necessary to guard the power system safety and stability. With the significant number of substations and relay protection devices, the maintenance workload has become difficult due to limited manpower, posing hidden dangers to the reliable operation of protection devices. In view of this, this article proposes an enhanced Faster R-CNN algorithm to diagnose the relay protection devices based on image monitoring. The proposed algorithm uses RestNet50 as the main tool to recognize features from input images to generate feature maps. Meanwhile, to improve the image detection accuracy, the Non-Maximum Sup-pression (NMS) algorithm in regional suggestion network (RPN) is optimized from solid thresh-old to soft threshold. By combining the images captured by the surveillance camera, intelligent inspections are conducted on the status of the pressing plate, fiber bending, external object retention, and other items in the relay protection device. A great number of samples are used to train networks for different tasks. The results indicate that the enhanced Faster R-CNN has a higher image recognition rate, and the recognition accuracy of each inspection item for the protection device is higher than 95%.