Vision diagnostics of power transmission lines: Approach to recognition of insulators

Abstract

Due to requirements related to the maintenance of power transmission lines, it is necessary to diagnose their condition regularly. Among approaches being nowadays applied fundamental technical diagnostic methods are the vision inspections, often performed with use of cameras. The aim of this paper is to develop a method of automated recognition of insulators in images for the purposes of further computer analysis of their technical condition. Application of image segmentation by the statistical region merging method lets separate objects visible in images of very composed backgrounds. In order to recognize the insulators the template matching by an improved brute force method was used. The author proposes an approach which makes use of the fact that insulators are longitudinal and the problem with scaling and rotation variability is solved. The proposed algorithm can be applied to automatic recognition of insulators as well as any oblong elements in images.