Research Paper:
Mobile-RCNN: Research on a Fire Detection Algorithm for Transmission Lines and Their Surroundings
Jiaxian Chen, Shuang Xu, and Yuanyuan Xing
Guangdong Power Grid Company Foshan Power Supply Bureau
No.1 Fenjiang South Road, Foshan, Guangdong 528000, China
Corresponding author
With the advancement of the intellectualization of power systems, visible light images captured by inspection robots have found extensive applications in the condition monitoring of transmission lines. However, two key challenges persist in real-world scenarios. First, critical components such as insulators and spacer dampers are frequently configured in dense and small-scale arrangements, rendering them prone to being overlooked by traditional detection methods owing to insufficient feature extraction or inadequate contextual modeling. Second, transmission corridors are often susceptible to various safety hazards, including encroaching vegetation, accumulated water, floating plastic films, and smoke from nearby fires, each posing a significant threat to operational reliability and the safe and stable operation of the power grid. Therefore, we propose a model named Mobile-RCNN that is capable of detecting both densely arranged and small-scale components as well as safety hazards. First, we constructed a safety hazard dataset through on-site photography. Second, we introduced the Q-linear-NMS post-processing method that replaced the non-maximum suppression (NMS) approach with Soft-NMS and incorporated a linear suppression control coefficient. Then, we replaced the intersection over union (IOU) evaluation method for overlapping detection boxes with the distance-IOU (DIOU) evaluation method and introduced an adjustment parameter for the degree of score suppression. Finally, to enable the backbone feature extraction network to better learn the characteristics of safety hazards and provide rich information for the subsequent detection network, we adopted MobileNetV3 as the feature extraction network for the Mobile-RCNN. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed model detected densely arranged targets and accurately identified the locations of safety hazards, providing robust technical support for the construction of an intelligent, reliable, and all-weather operation and maintenance system for power systems.
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