An Improved YOLOv7 Model Based on Visual Attention Fusion: Application to the Recognition of Bouncing Locks in Substation Power Cabinets

Abstract

Featured Application: This work can be applied to the task of environmental perception of a mobile manipulator based on visual guidance, such as opening a spring lock to open a door in the dangerous environment of a substation. With the continuous progress of intelligent power system technology, in order to meet the needs of substation operation and maintenance, a target detection algorithm is applied to identify the status of equipment switches. YOLOv7, as the latest achievement of YOLO (You Only Look Once) series algorithms, has good speed and accuracy in target detection tasks. However, when the generalized network is applied in a specific scenario, its advantages are not obvious due to its high weight and poor portability. In this paper, an improved GF-YOLOv7 network model is proposed to apply in the recognition of the status of bounce locks in a substation. The MobileViT module is used to improve the feature extraction ability of the backbone network. Referring to the CBAM feature attention mechanism, the channel attention module and the spatial attention module are used to design a more lightweight feature fusion network. The experimental results in the test set show that the proposed network can significantly reduce the network weight and improve the detection accuracy on the basis of a small reduction in the detection speed, and the accuracy reaches 97.8%, which can meet the needs of the detection task of substation bounce locks.