Online Detection of Snow Coverage and Swing Angles of Electrical Insulators on Power Transmission Lines Using Videos
Paper in proceeding, 2009

A potential fatal problem for electrical power delivery through power lines in Northern countries is when snow or ice accumulates on electrical insulators. This could lead to snow or ice-induced outages and voltage collapse, causing huge economic loss. Further, large swing angles due to wind may cause short circuits. This paper presents a novel video surveillance system for detecting snow coverage on electric insulators and swing angles of insulators using videos from a remote outdoor 420 kV power transmission line. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first insulator snow surveillance system base on automatic image analysis techniques. We propose using hybrid techniques by combining histograms, boundaries and template cross-correlations for analyzing a broad range of scenarios caused by changing weather and lighting conditions. Experiments on videos captured during several month periods have shown promising and valuable estimation results. For image pixels related to snow on insulators, our system has yielded an average detection rate of 93% for good quality images and 67.6% for poor quality images, and a corresponding average false alarm of 9% and 18.1%.

ice detection

snow detection

electric insulator surveillance

swing angle

insulator image analysis.

Author

Irene Yu-Hua Gu

Chalmers, Signals and Systems, Signal Processing and Biomedical Engineering

Unai Sistiaga

Chalmers, Signals and Systems, Signal Processing and Biomedical Engineering

Sonja Berlijn

Anders Fahlström

IEEE international conf. on image processing (ICIP 2009), Cairo, EGYPT, NOV 07-10, 2009

Vol. 1-6 3213-3216
978-1-4244-5653-6 (ISBN)

Subject Categories

Signal Processing

Computer Vision and Robotics (Autonomous Systems)

Other Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering

ISBN

978-1-4244-5653-6

More information

Created

10/6/2017