PowerStrand-YOLO: A High-Voltage Transmission Conductor Defect Detection Method for UAV Aerial Imagery

Zhenrong Deng, Jun Li, Junjie Huang, Shuaizheng Jiang, Qiuying Wu and Rui Yang ()
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Zhenrong Deng: School of Computer Science and Information Security, Guilin University of Electronic Technology, Guilin 541004, China
Jun Li: School of Computer Science and Information Security, Guilin University of Electronic Technology, Guilin 541004, China
Junjie Huang: School of Computer Science and Information Security, Guilin University of Electronic Technology, Guilin 541004, China
Shuaizheng Jiang: Guangxi Shuifa Digital Technology Co., Ltd., Nanning 530000, China
Qiuying Wu: Guangxi Shuifa Digital Technology Co., Ltd., Nanning 530000, China
Rui Yang: School of Computer Science and Information Security, Guilin University of Electronic Technology, Guilin 541004, China

Mathematics, 2025, vol. 13, issue 17, 1-21

Abstract: Broken or loose strands in high-voltage transmission conductors constitute critical defects that jeopardize grid reliability. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) inspection has become indispensable for their timely discovery; however, conventional detectors falter in the face of cluttered backgrounds and the conductors’ diminutive pixel footprint, yielding sub-optimal accuracy and throughput. To overcome these limitations, we present PowerStrand-YOLO—an enhanced YOLOv8 derivative tailored for UAV imagery. The method is trained on a purpose-built dataset and integrates three technical contributions. (1) A C2f_DCNv4 module is introduced to strengthen multi-scale feature extraction. (2) An EMA attention mechanism is embedded to suppress background interference and emphasize defect-relevant cues. (3) The original loss function is superseded by Shape-IoU, compelling the network to attend closely to the geometric contours and spatial layout of strand anomalies. Extensive experiments demonstrate 95.4% precision, 96.2% recall, and 250 FPS. Relative to the baseline YOLOv8, PowerStrand-YOLO improves precision by 3% and recall by 6.8% while accelerating inference. Moreover, it also demonstrates competitive performance on the VisDrone2019 dataset. These results establish the improved framework as a more accurate and efficient solution for UAV-based inspection of power transmission lines.

Keywords: Transmission Conductor Defect Detection; UAV-based inspection; Power Inspection; YOLO (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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