Power Line Segmentation Algorithm Based on Lightweight Network and Residue-like Cross-Layer Feature Fusion

Power line segmentation plays a critical role in ensuring the safety of transmission line UAV inspection flights. To address the challenges of small target scale, complex backgrounds, and excessive model parameters in existing deep learning-based power line segmentation algorithms, this paper introduces RGS-UNet, a lightweight segmentation model integrating a residual-like cross-layer feature fusion module. First, ResNet18 is adopted to reconstruct a UNet backbone network as an encoder module to enhance the network's feature extraction capability for small targets. Second, ordinary convolution in the residual block of ResNet18 is optimized by introducing the Ghost Module, which significantly reduces the computational load of the model's backbone network. Third, a residual-like addition method is designed to embed the SIMAM attention mechanism module into both encoder and decoder stages, which improves the model's ability to extract power lines from complex backgrounds. Finally, the Mish activation function is applied in deep convolutional layers to maintain feature extraction accuracy and mitigate overfitting. Experimental results demonstrate that compared with classical UNet, the optimized network achieves 2.05% and 2.58% improvements in F1-Score and IoU, respectively, while reducing the parameter count to 57.25% of the original model. The algorithm achieves better performance improvements in both accuracy and lightweighting, making it suitable for edge-side deployment.