Attention-Guided Autoencoder Fusion for Insulator Defect Detection Using UAV Transmission-Line Imaging
Automated defect detection in high-voltage transmission-line insulators remains challenging due to severe class imbalance, large scale variation, and the small spatial extent of defect instances in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) imagery. To address these challenges, this paper proposes AE-YOLO, an Attention-Guided AutoEncoder-Enhanced YOLO framework for robust insulator defect detection. The architecture integrates lightweight bottleneck autoencoders within a Feature Pyramid Network-Path Aggregation Network (FPN-PAN) neck. This preserves anomaly-sensitive information during multi-scale feature fusion. Convolutional Block Attention Modules (CBAM) are used throughout the backbone, enhancing feature discrimination and suppressing background interference. The framework also introduces a variance-maximizing autoencoder regularization strategy, which encourages diverse, defect-discriminative latent representations. The network trains using a unified objective that combines focal loss, Complete IoU (CIoU) loss, and autoencoder regularization to address foreground-background imbalance and improve localization accuracy. During inference, Weighted Boxes Fusion (WBF) combines predictions from YOLOv8, YOLOv10, and YOLO11. An autoencoder-guided confidence boosting mechanism improves sensitivity to rare defect categories. Experiments on the Insulator-Defect Detection dataset show that AE-YOLO with an EfficientNetV2 backbone achieves 95.10 percent mAP at 0.5, 96.40 percent precision, and 93.80 percent recall. This performance surpasses the strongest YOLO-family baseline by 5.0 points in mAP at 0.5 and 6.7 points in recall. These results confirm the effectiveness and adaptability of the framework. The model is a practical and scalable solution for UAV-based transmission-line inspection and defect monitoring.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
A Lightweight Insulator Defect Detection Model Based on Drone Images
With the continuous development and construction of new power systems, using drones to inspect the condition of transmission line insulators has become an inevitable trend. To facilitate the deployment of drone hardware …
Defect DetectionInsulator Defect DetectionObject DetectionSmall Object DetectionLiteYOLO-ID: A Lightweight Object Detection Network for Insulator Defect Detection
Insulator defect detection is of great significance to ensure the normal operation of power transmission and distribution networks. In response to the problems of low speed, low accuracy, and difficulty in deploying to e…
Defect DetectionInsulator Defect DetectionModel Compressionobject-detection+1YOLO-ELA: Efficient Local Attention Modeling for High-Performance Real-Time Insulator Defect Detection
Existing detection methods for insulator defect identification from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) struggle with complex background scenes and small objects, leading to suboptimal accuracy and a high number of false posi…
Data AugmentationDefect DetectionDiversityInsulator Defect Detection+3Intelligent detect for substation insulator defects based on CenterMask
With the development of intelligent operation and maintenance of substations, the daily inspection of substations needs to process massive video and image data. This puts forward higher requirements on the processing spe…
Defect DetectionImproved YOLOv7 model for insulator defect detection
Insulators are crucial insulation components and structural supports in power grids, playing a vital role in the transmission lines. Due to temperature fluctuations, internal stress, or damage from hail, insulators are p…
Defect DetectionInsulator Defect Detectionmodel