Aerial identification of flashed over faulty insulator using binary image classification

Flashed over insulator faults are the most significant faults in high voltage line insulators. They are complicated to identify using traditional methods due to their labor-intensive nature. This study proposes a deep learning-based algorithm for detecting flashed over insulator faults in the real time. The algorithm is based on the Resnet 50 architecture, which has been shown to be effective for image classification tasks in the previous studies regarding image analysis. The algorithm is fast, robust and efficient, making it suitable for real-time applications. The algorithm is trained on a dataset of images of flashed over and non-flashed over insulators. This dataset was collected from various transmission lines and National Center of Robotics and Automation, which are located in Pakistan. For validating the effectiveness of the Resnet 50 algorithm, it was compared with the results obtained from the two other widely popular deep learning algorithms, Densenet 121 and VGG 16 (trained and validated on the same dataset). The results showed that the Resnet 50 was able to detect flashed over insulator faults with an accuracy of over 99%. Whereas the Densenet 121 and VGG 16 have achieved an accuracy of less than 51%

Outdoor Insulation and Gas Insulated Switchgears

This book focuses on theoretical and practical developments in the performance of high-voltage transmission line against atmospheric pollution and icing. Modifications using suitable fillers are also pinpointed to improve silicone rubber insulation materials. Very fast transient overvoltage (VFTO) mitigation techniques, along with some suggestions for reliable partial discharge measurements under DC voltage stresses inside gas-insulated switchgears, are addressed. The application of an inductor-based filter for the protective performance of surge arresters against indirect lightning strikes is also discussed

Industrial Applications: New Solutions for the New Era

This book reprints articles from the Special Issue "Industrial Applications: New Solutions for the New Age" published online in the open-access journal Machines (ISSN 2075-1702). This book consists of twelve published articles. This special edition belongs to the "Mechatronic and Intelligent Machines" section

Hydrophobicity Classification of RTV Silicone Rubber-Coated Insulators Using Deep Learning Algorithms

Silicone rubber-based outdoor polymeric insulators are widely employed in electric power transmission and distribution networks to replace conventional ceramic insulators, owing to their superior performance in contaminated and wet environments. Silicone rubber (SIR) insulators offer several advantages like high hydrophobicity, low cost, vandalism resistance, and lightweight. However, when exposed to electrical (dry band arcing and partial discharge) and environmental stresses (humidity, ultraviolet radiation, acid rain and pollution) they suffer from different forms of aging. The first form of aging is the temporal loss of hydrophobicity. However, SIR insulators can recover the hydrophobicity property due to the diffusion of the low molecular weight (LMW) from the bulk of the insulating material to the insulators’ surface. Hence, it is important to classify the hydrophobicity status of SIR insulators as an indication of the aging degree. Different methods have been implemented to classify the hydrophobicity of the insulator surface including static contact angle measurement, dynamic contact angle measurement, and hydrophobicity class (HC). The later technique is the most practical method that can be used in the field and can assess a wide surface area. The surface wetting tendency is manually classified using one of six classes, i.e. HC1-HC6, where HC1 refers to a completely hydrophobic surface and HC6 is a completely hydrophilic surface. The main objective of this thesis is to automatically assess the hydrophobicity classes of non-ceramic insulators under a variety of conditions using deep learning techniques. A dataset of hydrophobicity classes (HC1-HC6) was created and prepared including 4197 images each having 2242×24 pixels size to train the proposed model. Several deep learning techniques, including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Transfer Learning (TL), and Object Detection (OD), were used in this thesis to categorize and assess the hydrophobicity classes of ceramic insulators coated with room temperature vulcanized silicone rubber (RTV-SIR). MobileNet model was found to have the highest accuracy and less training time after comparing with other CNN pre-trained models. This model was then trained and tested under several conditions, including indoor, bright, and dark lighting conditions, and achieved accuracy of 97.77%, 89.44%, and 95%, respectively. Moreover, the proposed model achieved a recognition rate of 96.11% when tested on a full-scale silicone rubber insulator. The developed model was then deployed as a web application for convenience in the assessment of hydrophobicity classes. The proposed model could be utilized to evaluate SIR insulators surface conditions in an effective and automatic way under different conditions

A Study of Multilayer Perceptron Networks Applied to Classification of Ceramic Insulators Using Ultrasound

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Semi-automatic liquid filling system using NodeMCU as an integrated Iot Learning tool

Computer programming and IoT are the key skills required in Industrial Revolution 4.0 (IR4.0). The industry demand is very high and therefore related students in this field should grasp adequate knowledge and skill in college or university prior to employment. However, learning technology related subject without applying it to an actual hardware can pose difficulty to relate the theoretical knowledge to problems in real application. It is proven that learning through hands-on activities is more effective and promotes deeper understanding of the subject matter (He et al. in Integrating Internet of Things (IoT) into STEM undergraduate education: Case study of a modern technology infused courseware for embedded system course. Erie, PA, USA, pp 1–9 (2016)). Thus, to fulfill the learning requirement, an integrated learning tool that combines learning of computer programming and IoT control for an industrial liquid filling system model is developed and tested. The integrated learning tool uses NodeMCU, Blynk app and smartphone to enable the IoT application. The system set-up is pre-designed for semi-automation liquid filling process to enhance hands-on learning experience but can be easily programmed for full automation. Overall, it is a user and cost friendly learning tool that can be developed by academic staff to aid learning of IoT and computer programming in related education levels and field

Visible, near infrared and thermal hand-based image biometric recognition

Biometric Recognition refers to the automatic identification of a person based on his or her anatomical characteristic or modality (i.e., fingerprint, palmprint, face) or behavioural (i.e., signature) characteristic. It is a fundamental key issue in any process concerned with security, shared resources, network transactions among many others. Arises as a fundamental problem widely known as recognition, and becomes a must step before permission is granted. It is supposed that protects key resources by only allowing those resources to be used by users that have been granted authority to use or to have access to them. Biometric systems can operate in verification mode, where the question to be solved is Am I who I claim I am? or in identification mode where the question is Who am I? Scientific community has increased its efforts in order to improve performance of biometric systems. Depending on the application many solutions go in the way of working with several modalities or combining different classification methods. Since increasing modalities require some user inconvenience many of these approaches will never reach the market. For example working with iris, face and fingerprints requires some user effort in order to help acquisition. This thesis addresses hand-based biometric system in a thorough way. The main contributions are in the direction of a new multi-spectral hand-based image database and methods for performance improvement. The main contributions are: A) The first multi-spectral hand-based image database from both hand faces: palmar and dorsal. Biometric database are a precious commodity for research, mainly when it offers something new like visual (VIS), near infrared (NIR) and thermography (TIR) images at a time. This database with a length of 100 users and 10 samples per user constitute a good starting point to check algorithms and hand suitability for recognition. B) In order to correctly deal with raw hand data, some image preprocessing steps are necessary. Three different segmentation phases are deployed to deal with VIS, NIR and TIR images specifically. Some of the tough questions to address: overexposed images, ring fingers and the cuffs, cold finger and noise image. Once image segmented, two different approaches are prepared to deal with the segmented data. These two approaches called: Holistic and Geometric define the main focus to extract the feature vector. These feature vectors can be used alone or can be combined in some way. Many questions can be stated: e.g. which approach is better for recognition?, Can fingers alone obtain better performance than the whole hand? and Is thermography hand information suitable for recognition due to its thermoregulation properties? A complete set of data ready to analyse, coming from the holistic and geometric approach have been designed and saved to test. Some innovative geometric approach related to curvature will be demonstrated. C) Finally the Biometric Dispersion Matcher (BDM) is used in order to explore how it works under different fusion schemes, as well as with different classification methods. It is the intention of this research to contrast what happen when using other methods close to BDM like Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA). At this point, some interesting questions will be solved, e.g. by taking advantage of the finger segmentation (as five different modalities) to figure out if they can outperform what the whole hand data can teach us.El Reconeixement Biomètric fa referència a la identi cació automàtica de persones fent us d'alguna característica o modalitat anatòmica (empremta digital) o d'alguna característica de comportament (signatura). És un aspecte fonamental en qualsevol procés relacionat amb la seguretat, la compartició de recursos o les transaccions electròniques entre d'altres. És converteix en un pas imprescindible abans de concedir l'autorització. Aquesta autorització, s'entén que protegeix recursos clau, permeten així, que aquests siguin utilitzats pels usuaris que han estat autoritzats a utilitzar-los o a tenir-hi accés. Els sistemes biomètrics poden funcionar en veri cació, on es resol la pregunta: Soc jo qui dic que soc? O en identi cació on es resol la qüestió: Qui soc jo? La comunitat cientí ca ha incrementat els seus esforços per millorar el rendiment dels sistemes biomètrics. En funció de l'aplicació, diverses solucions s'adrecen a treballar amb múltiples modalitats o combinant diferents mètodes de classi cació. Donat que incrementar el número de modalitats, representa a la vegada problemes pels usuaris, moltes d'aquestes aproximacions no arriben mai al mercat. La tesis contribueix principalment en tres grans àrees, totes elles amb el denominador comú següent: Reconeixement biometric a través de les mans. i) La primera d'elles constitueix la base de qualsevol estudi, les dades. Per poder interpretar, i establir un sistema de reconeixement biomètric prou robust amb un clar enfocament a múltiples fonts d'informació, però amb el mínim esforç per part de l'usuari es construeix aquesta Base de Dades de mans multi espectral. Les bases de dades biomètriques constitueixen un recurs molt preuat per a la recerca; sobretot si ofereixen algun element nou com es el cas. Imatges de mans en diferents espectres electromagnètics: en visible (VIS), en infraroig (NIR) i en tèrmic (TIR). Amb un total de 100 usuaris, i 10 mostres per usuari, constitueix un bon punt de partida per estudiar i posar a prova sistemes multi biomètrics enfocats a les mans. ii) El segon bloc s'adreça a les dues aproximacions existents en la literatura per a tractar les dades en brut. Aquestes dues aproximacions, anomenades Holística (tracta la imatge com un tot) i Geomètrica (utilitza càlculs geomètrics) de neixen el focus alhora d'extreure el vector de característiques. Abans de tractar alguna d'aquestes dues aproximacions, però, és necessària l'aplicació de diferents tècniques de preprocessat digital de la imatge per obtenir les regions d'interès desitjades. Diferents problemes presents a les imatges s'han hagut de solucionar de forma original per a cadascuna de les tipologies de les imatges presents: VIS, NIR i TIR. VIS: imatges sobre exposades, anells, mànigues, braçalets. NIR: Ungles pintades, distorsió en forma de soroll en les imatges TIR: Dits freds La segona àrea presenta aspectes innovadors, ja que a part de segmentar la imatge de la ma, es segmenten tots i cadascun dels dits (feature-based approach). Així aconseguim contrastar la seva capacitat de reconeixement envers la ma de forma completa. Addicionalment es presenta un conjunt de procediments geomètrics amb la idea de comparar-los amb els provinents de l'extracció holística. La tercera i última àrea contrasta el procediment de classi cació anomenat Biometric Dispersion Matcher (BDM) amb diferents situacions. La primera relacionada amb l'efectivitat respecte d'altres mètode de reconeixement, com ara l'Anàlisi Lineal Discriminant (LDA) o bé mètodes com KNN o la regressió logística. Les altres situacions que s'analitzen tenen a veure amb múltiples fonts d'informació, quan s'apliquen tècniques de normalització i/o estratègies de combinació (fusió) per millorar els resultats. Els resultats obtinguts no deixen lloc per a la confusió, i són certament prometedors en el sentit que posen a la llum la importància de combinar informació complementària per obtenir rendiments superiors

Machine learning techniques for robotic and autonomous inspection of mechanical systems and civil infrastructure

Machine learning and in particular deep learning techniques have demonstrated the most efficacy in training, learning, analyzing, and modelling large complex structured and unstructured datasets. These techniques have recently been commonly deployed in different industries to support robotic and autonomous system (RAS) requirements and applications ranging from planning and navigation to machine vision and robot manipulation in complex environments. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art with regard to RAS technologies (including unmanned marine robot systems, unmanned ground robot systems, climbing and crawler robots, unmanned aerial vehicles, and space robot systems) and their application for the inspection and monitoring of mechanical systems and civil infrastructure. We explore various types of data provided by such systems and the analytical techniques being adopted to process and analyze these data. This paper provides a brief overview of machine learning and deep learning techniques, and more importantly, a classification of the literature which have reported the deployment of such techniques for RAS-based inspection and monitoring of utility pipelines, wind turbines, aircrafts, power lines, pressure vessels, bridges, etc. Our research provides documented information on the use of advanced data-driven technologies in the analysis of critical assets and examines the main challenges to the applications of such technologies in the industry

Deep Learning Methods for Remote Sensing

Remote sensing is a field where important physical characteristics of an area are exacted using emitted radiation generally captured by satellite cameras, sensors onboard aerial vehicles, etc. Captured data help researchers develop solutions to sense and detect various characteristics such as forest fires, flooding, changes in urban areas, crop diseases, soil moisture, etc. The recent impressive progress in artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning has sparked innovations in technologies, algorithms, and approaches and led to results that were unachievable until recently in multiple areas, among them remote sensing. This book consists of sixteen peer-reviewed papers covering new advances in the use of AI for remote sensing