A Lightweight Insulator Detection Methodology for UAVs in Power Line Inspection

The defect of insulators on the power line may lead to the failure of the electric transmission system, which in turn endangers the safe and reliable operation of the whole power system. Therefore, timely and accurate detection of insulators has become a current research hotspot. However, manual inspection cannot guarantee real-time detection and is prone to security accidents. Thanks to the convenience of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), collecting insulator images by UAVs and designing detection algorithms on insulators for real-time and accurate insulator detection have become a practical option. In this paper, considering the poor computing resources of UAVs, a lightweight object detection algorithm, NanoDet, is trained to detect insulators. In addition, to fully utilize the computing resources, the proposed model is segmented. Power-efficient layers are mapped to the central processing units (CPUs) for execution. Experimental results indicate that the proposed model can cut down the power consumption by up to 46.4% without violating the time constraint.