Aerial Inspection of High-Voltage Power Lines Using YOLOv8 Real-Time Object Detector

The aerial inspection of electricity infrastructure is gaining high interest due to the rapid advancements in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology, which has proven to be a cost- and time-effective solution for deploying computer vision techniques. Our objectives are focused on enabling the real-time detection of key power line components and identifying missing caps on insulators. To address the need for real-time detection, we evaluate the latest single-stage object detector, YOLOv8. We propose a fine-tuned model based on YOLOv8's architecture, trained on a custom dataset with three object classes, i.e., towers, insulators, and conductors, resulting in an overall accuracy rate of 83.8% (mAP@0.5). The model was tested on a GeForce RTX 3070 (8 GB), as well as on a CPU, reaching 243 fps and 39 fps for video footage, respectively. We also verify that our model can serve as a baseline for other power line detection models; a defect detection model for insulators was trained using our model's pre-trained weights on an open-source dataset, increasing precision and recall class predictions (F1-score). The model achieved a 99.5% accuracy rate in classifying defective insulators (mAP@0.5).