Automatic infrared image recognition method for substation equipment based on a deep self-attention network and multi-factor similarity calculation

Infrared image recognition plays an important role in the inspection of power equipment. Existing technologies dedicated to this purpose often require manually selected features, which are not transferable and interpretable, and have limited training data. To address these limitations, this paper proposes an automatic infrared image recognition framework, which includes an object recognition module based on a deep self-attention network and a temperature distribution identification module based on a multi-factor similarity calculation. First, the features of an input image are extracted and embedded using a multi-head attention encoding–decoding mechanism. Thereafter, the embedded features are used to predict the equipment component category and location. In the located area, preliminary segmentation is performed. Finally, similar areas are gradually merged, and the temperature distribution of the equipment is obtained to identify a fault. Our experiments indicate that the proposed method demonstrates significantly improved accuracy compared with other related methods and, hence, provides a good reference for the automation of power equipment inspection.