A new thermographic NDT for condition monitoring of electrical components using ANN with confidence level analysis

Infrared thermography technology is one of the most effective non-destructive testing techniques for predictive faults diagnosis of electrical components. Faults in electrical system show overheating of components which is a common indicator of poor connection, overloading, load imbalance or any defect. Thermographic inspection is employed for finding such heat related problems before eventual failure of the system. However, an automatic diagnostic system based on artificial neural network reduces operating time, human efforts and also increases the reliability of system. In the present study, statistical features and artificial neural network (ANN) with confidence level analysis are utilized for inspection of electrical components and their thermal conditions are classified into two classes namely normal and overheated. All the features extracted from images do not produce good performance. Features having low performance reduce the diagnostic performance. The study reveals the performance of each feature individually for selecting the suitable feature set. In order to find the individual feature performance, each feature of thermal image was used as input for neural network and the classification of condition types were used as output target. The multilayered perceptron network using Levenberg-Marquardt training algorithm was used as classifier. The performances were determined in terms of percentage of accuracy, specificity, sensitivity, false positive and false negative. After selecting the suitable features, the study introduces the intelligent diagnosis system using suitable features as inputs of neural network. Finally, confidence percentage and confidence level were used to find out the strength of the network outputs for condition monitoring. The experimental result shows that multilayered perceptron network produced 79.4% of testing accuracy with 43.60%, 12.60%, 21.40, 9.20% and 13.40% highest, high, moderate, low and lowest confidence level respectively.