A Lightweight Electric Meter Recognition Model for Power Inspection Robots

Power inspection robots are essential for ensuring safe and optimal operation of power systems. However, during the operation of the power inspection robot, constraints imposed by computational and storage resources slow down the detection speed of the power system, failing to meet real-time monitoring requirements. To address these issues, this study proposes a lightweight electric meter recognition model for power inspection robots based on YOLOv5. The aim is to ensure efficient operation of the model on embedded devices, achieve real-time meter recognition, and enhance the practicality of the inspection robot. In the proposed model, GhostNet, a lightweight network, is employed as the YOLOv5 backbone feature extraction module, thus improving the model’s computational efficiency. In addition, the Wise-IoU (WIoU) loss function is used to improve the localization accuracy of the electric meter recognition model. Moreover, the GSConv module was introduced in the neck network for further model lightweighting. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed model achieves a recognition accuracy of 98.8%, a recall rate of 98.8%, and a frame rate of 416.67 frames per second, while reducing computational volume by 25% compared to the YOLOv5 model. Furthermore, through case studies and comparisons, we illustrated the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach.