A lighter weight substation infrared defect detection algorithm combining de‐weighted feature fusion and loss function fusion

The traditional infrared inspection of substations is usually done by employees with handheld infrared equipment, but the traditional inspection efficiency is not high, and some of the inspection locations have harsh environments, high voltage levels, and high‐risk factors. Given the above problems, this paper proposes an improved defect detection algorithm for substations based on YOLO v7 to solve the difficult problem of infrared inspection of substations. First, the lighter SE‐GhostNetV2 feature extraction network is designed to reduce the computation volume; second, the de‐weighted BIFPN structure is designed for the substation infrared image features to improve the ability of information interaction; finally, the new C‐NWD Loss is proposed to realize the detection of smaller substation equipment and reducing missed detections. The experimental results show that the hybrid accuracy of the algorithm designed in this paper is improved from 92.1% to 96.6%, the model parameters are reduced by 40.1%, the computation amount is reduced by 65%, the detection speed is improved by 87 FPS, and the false detection and missed detections is less, which can achieve real‐time infrared inspection of substations and solve the difficulties existing in traditional substation infrared detection.