Novel colour image encoding system combined with ANN for discharges pattern recognition on polluted insulator model

This study introduces a novel methodology for electrical discharges recognition elaborating an algorithm based on the RGB colour image model and artificial neural network (ANN) classifier. The developed RGB-ANN algorithm aims to detect and monitor the propagation of electrical discharges until flashover, through analysis of six colours appearing in the discharges images, extracted from the flashover videos recorded on a plan glass insulator model under uniform pollution. First, more than 300 colours images are collected and divided into sets to form a large database. Using an RGB encoding system, each pixel is represented by (R, G, B) coordinates and each image is encoded by 3D matrix. For the discharge image, the coordinates of each pixel are compared to all database ones. The colour of the database having the same coordinates of the discharge image pixel is attributed to this latter. Based on the ratio of the pixels number of a given colour to the total pixels number of the discharge image, six indicators are quantified and grouped to form a feature vector. This latter is used as input of the ANN, in order to classify the evolution of discharges into five classes. As the main result, >98% of images have been well classified.