Research on insulator image segmentation and defect recognition technology based on U‐Net and YOLOv7

Abstract This study focuses on aerial images in power line inspection, using a small sample size and concentrating on accurately segmenting insulators in images and identifying potential “self‐explode” defects through deep learning methods. The research process consists of four key steps: image segmentation of insulators, identification of small connected regions, data augmentation of original samples, and detection of insulator defects using the YOLO v7 model. In this paper, due to the small sample size, sample expansion is considered first. A sliding window approach is adopted to crop images, increasing the number of training samples. Subsequently, the U‐Net neural network model for semantic segmentation is used to train insulator images, thereby generating preliminary mask images of insulators. Then, through connected region area filtering techniques, smaller connected regions are removed to eliminate small speckles in the predicted mask images, obtaining more accurate insulator mask images. The evaluation metric for image recognition, the dice coefficient, is 93.67%. To target the identification of insulator defects, 35 images with insulator defects from the original samples are augmented. These images are input into the YOLO v7 network for further training, ultimately achieving effective detection of insulator “self‐explode” defects.