Multi-Geometric Reasoning Network for Insulator Defect Detection of Electric Transmission Lines

To address the challenges in the unmanned system-based intelligent inspection of electric transmission line insulators, this paper proposed a multi-geometric reasoning network (MGRN) to accurately detect insulator geometric defects based on aerial images with complex backgrounds and different scales. The spatial geometric reasoning sub-module (SGR) was developed to represent the spatial location relationship of defects. The appearance geometric reasoning sub-module (AGR) and the parallel feature transformation (PFT) sub-module were adopted to obtain the appearance geometric features from the real samples. These multi-geometric features can be fused with the original visual features to identify and locate the insulator defects. The proposed solution is assessed through experiments against the existing solutions and the numerical results indicate that it can significantly improve the detection accuracy of multiple insulator defects using the aerial images.