A Robust Faster R-CNN Model with Feature Enhancement for Rust Detection of Transmission Line Fitting

Rust of transmission line fittings is a major hidden risk to transmission safety. Since the fittings located at high altitude are inconvenient to detect and maintain, machine vision techniques have been introduced to realize the intelligent rust detection with the help of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). Due to the small size of fittings and disturbance of complex environmental background, however, there are often cases of missing detection and false detection. To improve the detection reliability and robustness, this paper proposes a new robust Faster R-CNN model with feature enhancement mechanism for the rust detection of transmission line fitting. Different from current methods that improve feature representation in front end, this paper adopts an idea of back-end feature enhancement. First, the residual network ResNet-101 is introduced as the backbone network to extract rich discriminative information from the UAV images. Second, a new feature enhancement mechanism is added after the region of interest (ROI) pooling layer. Through calculating the similarity between each region proposal and the others, the feature weights of the region proposals containing target object can be enhanced via the overlaying of the object’s representation. The weight of the disturbance terms can then be relatively reduced. Empirical evaluation is conducted on some real-world UAV monitoring images. The comparative results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model in terms of detection precision and recall rate, with the average precision of rust detection 97.07%, indicating that the proposed method can provide an reliable and robust solution for the rust detection.