An Attention-Based Bidirectional Feature Fusion Algorithm for Insulator Detection

To maintain reliability, safety, and sustainability in power transmission, insulator defect detection has become a critical task in power line inspection. Due to the complex backgrounds and small defect sizes encountered in insulator defect images, issues such as false detections and missed detections often occur. The existing You Only Look Once (YOLO) object detection algorithm is currently the mainstream method for image-based insulator defect detection in power lines. However, existing models suffer from low detection accuracy. To address this issue, this paper presents an improved YOLOv5-based MC-YOLO insulator detection algorithm. To effectively extract multi-scale information and enhance the model's ability to represent feature information, a multi-scale attention convolutional fusion (MACF) module incorporating an attention mechanism is proposed. This module utilises parallel convolutions with different kernel sizes to effectively extract features at various scales and highlights the feature representation of key targets through the attention mechanism, thereby improving the detection accuracy. Additionally, a cross-context feature fusion module (CCFM) is designed, where shallow features gain partial deep semantic supplementation and deep features absorb shallow spatial information, achieving bidirectional information flow. Furthermore, the Spatial-Channel Dual Attention Module (SCDAM) is introduced into CCFM. By incorporating a dynamic attention-guided bidirectional cross-fusion mechanism, it effectively resolves the feature deviation between shallow details and deep semantics during multi-scale feature fusion. The experimental results show that the MC-YOLO algorithm achieves an mAP@0.5 of 67.4% on the dataset used in this study, which is a 4.1% improvement over the original YOLOv5. Although the FPS is slightly reduced compared to the original model, it remains practical and capable of rapidly and accurately detecting insulator defects.