Electrical insulator defect detection with incomplete annotations and
imbalanced samples
Abstract
Insulators are one of the key components in high-voltage power systems
that prevent transmission lines from grounding. Since they are exposed
to different kinds of harsh environments and climates, periodic
inspection is indispensable for the safety and high quality of power
grid. Nowadays, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) inspection is more widely
used, facilitating incorporation of CNN-based detectors in the insulator
detection task. However, these methods are generally based on the
assumption that the image samples are balanced among different
categories and possess completely ideal annotations. The problem of
sample imbalance or incomplete annotation is rarely investigated in
depth for insulator defect detection. In this paper, we focus on
insulator defect detection with imbalanced data and incomplete
annotations. Our proposed framework, named Pi-Index, introduces Positive
Unlabeled (PU) learning to solve the problem of incomplete annotation
and designs a novel index the class prior, which is a key parameter in
PU learning. Moreover, focal loss is integrated in our framework to
alleviate the effect of sample imbalance. Experiment results demonstrate
that the proposed framework achieves better performance than the
baseline methods in situations of sample imbalance and missing
annotation.