Substation Equipment Defect Detection Based on Improved YOLOv8

The detection of equipment defects in substations is crucial for maintaining the normal operation of power systems. This paper proposes an object detection algorithm for substation equipment defect detection based on improvements to the YOLOv8 model. First, the backbone of YOLOv8 is replaced with EfficientViT, which not only reduces computational redundancy but also enhances the model's feature extraction capabilities, thereby improving overall performance. Second, a Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) attention mechanism module is incorporated at the terminal stage of the backbone network to reinforce channel-wise feature representation in input feature maps. Finally, the Bottleneck component within YOLOv8's C2f module is substituted with FasterBlock, which significantly accelerates inference speed while maintaining model accuracy. Experimental results on the substation equipment defect dataset demonstrate that the improved algorithm achieves a mean average precision (mAP) of 92.8%, representing a 1.8% enhancement over the baseline model. The substantial improvement in average precision confirms the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed modifications to the YOLOv8 architecture.