High Voltage Insulators Condition Analysis using Convolutional Neural Network

High voltage insulators are nonconductive materials that are in use to isolate the conductor from the earthed transmission tower. However, they are regularly subjected to operational environmental contamination and detrimental electrical or mechanical stress. Undesirable operational conditions can cause insulations' failure and ultimately the power transmission line outage. Therefore, monitoring and condition analysis of the insulators are essential tasks for the utility operators as well as transmission companies. With the widespread applications of deep learning techniques in engineering, in this study, we propose Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) as the backbone data analysis method and aerial images as the primary dataset. We conducted a model selection through an exhaustive search within a limited hyperparameter space based on our computational resources. We show that the constructed CNN classifier achieved a remarkable accuracy of 83.3% in classifying a clean insulator surface from the one covered with water droplets.