Insulator defect detection with deep learning: A survey

Abstract With the improvement of smart grid, utilizing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to detect the operation status of insulators has attracted widespread attention. The insulator defects can lead to serious power loss, damage the service life of power lines, and even result in power outages in serious cases. The small‐scale object, complex background, and limited‐number collected data make insulator defect still a challenging problem. Benefitted by the advances in deep learning, deep learning‐based insulator defects have achieved great progress in recent years. In the paper, the authors present a novel systematic survey of these advances, where further analysis about different processing stages methods is introduced: (i) insulator processing stage methods exploit the specific image pre‐processing algorithm for data augmentation and low‐level vision information extraction; (ii) defect detection stage model can locate and classify diagnosis fault with different task targets, like sequential task strategy and multi‐task strategy. In addition, the authors also review publicly available benchmark and datasets. The future research direction and open problem are discussed to promote the development of the community.