A lightweight foreign object intrusion detection model for transmission lines based on improved YOLOv8n

LI Shen; DU Ke; LI Zhouyan; LI Ning; XIONG Cen; LIU Minghui; ZHANG Yunqi; QIN Lunming

doi:10.11860/j.issn.1673-0291.20240016

Abstract：Aiming at the problems of low accuracy and high model complexity in foreign object detec-tion caused by the large scale variations and variable shape of foreign object targets in the complex envi-ronment of transmission lines,an improved foreign object detection model DLS-YOLOv8n is pro-posed.Firstly,the Bottleneck structure in the C2f module of the backbone network is replaced by the Deformable Convolution Bottleneck module to strengthen the model's feature extraction ability of for-eign object targets with variable shapes and improve the detection accuracy;Secondly,a Light Bi-directional Feature Pyramid Network is proposed to replace the neck network of the original model,which reduces the number of model parameters and computational complexity while improving the detection accuracy of the network on small targets;Thirdly,a parameter free attention mechanism SimAM is added before the model detection head to enhance the model's attention to targets in complex environments.Finally,to validate the performance of the DLS-YOLOv8n model,abla-tion experiments and multiple comparative experiments are conducted on a power line foreign ob-ject dataset.Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves an mAP of 97.1％on the dataset of foreign objects in transmission lines,with a model parameter number of 2.07 M and a computational complexity of 6.9 G.Compared with the original YOLOv8n model,the mAP is increased by 1.6％,and the parameter number and computational complexity are reduced by 31％and 14％,respectively.Compared with one-stage detection models such as(Single Shot MultiBox Detector,SSD),YOLOv5s,and YOLOv7-tiny,the proposed model achieves the highest detec-tion accuracy while maintaining the lowest complexity.The research findings can provide valuable reference and insights for the field of transmission line inspection.