An infrared image detection of power equipment based on super‐resolution reconstruction and YOLOv4

Infrared imaging technology is widely used in the fault diagnosis of power equipment. The power equipment images obtained by infrared thermal cameras generally have the characteristics of low resolution, low contrast, similar geometric features, and complex image backgrounds. The traditional infrared image detection methods have problems of low detection accuracy, low real‐time performance, and missed and fault detection, all of which will lead to great difficulties in the automatic identification process of infrared images of power equipment. This paper adopted an algorithm based on You Only Look Once (YOLO) v4 to realize the detection of electrical equipment under infrared images. First of all, the authors utilized the Fast Super‐Resolution Convolutional Neural Network (FSRCNN) algorithm to perform super‐resolution reconstruction on the infrared images of power equipment to achieve image enhancement. Moreover, the lightweight network Mobilenetv3 was selected as the backbone network of YOLOv4 to improve the running speed by reducing network parameters. Finally, the performance of the YOLOv4 algorithm was compared to verify the effectiveness of the algorithm proposed in this paper. The experimental results showed that the proposed method had strong generalization ability and reliable detection of infrared targets of various types of power equipment, with the mean average precision (mAP) reaching 91.3%.