Voltage-Induced Heating Defect Detection for Electrical Equipment in Thermal Images

Abstract

Voltage-induced heating defect is a type of defect that may occur in transformation substation equipment. Although this type of defect is less common compared to current-induced heating defects, it is crucial to identify it due to its association with severe insulation degradation problems that require prompt intervention. However, the temperature variations caused by these defects may be relatively subtle, making it challenging to distinguish them in thermal images. In this work, considering the characteristics of voltage-induced heating defects and the scarcity of defect data, we propose a two-stage method for defect detection. In the first stage, we employ oriented R-CNN to detect oriented parts of the equipment, accurately localizing the centerline of each part. In the second stage, we extract the temperature distribution along the centerline of specific parts and discretize them as features. Subsequently, we train one-class support vector machines based on the features extracted from normal images for defect diagnosis. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is capable of accurately detecting defects while maintaining a low false positive rate.