Insulators Defect Detection for Power Grid Based on Improved Yolov7 Algorithm

High-current out-of-phase closed bus is an essential link in the transmission of electric energy and is widely used in thermal power stations, hydropower stations and nuclear power plants. Although these busbars have the advantages of excellent dustproof effect and strong magnetic shielding, they are susceptible to insulator aging and damage in long-term operation, posing a potential safety risk to the power grid. Due to the enclosed space inside the bus and the complexity of external maintenance tasks, manual inspection has problems such as inefficiency and low safety. In order to solve these problems, this paper proposes an improved detection algorithm based on Yolov7 for insulator defect detection in hydropower station scenarios. Because of the particularity of Yolov7 network structure and application scenarios, this paper proposes a Channel Feature Enhancement module to enhance the channel representation ability of the network. In addition, an Edge Feature Enhancement module is introduced to improve the boundary detection of insulators by enhancing the contrast between the target and the background. Considering the limitations of existing studies in specific scenarios and the scarcity of dataset, this paper constructs and accurately annotates an insulator defect detection dataset applied to hydropower station scenarios. Experimental results show that the improved-Yolov7-tiny algorithm in this paper achieves a balance between accuracy and inference speed.