Insulator Defect Detection Method upon Fused Attention Mechanism and Bidirectional Feature Fusion

Abstract Insulators are important components for achieving electrical insulation and mechanical support, but they are prone to various defects in harsh operating environments, which can damage their mechanical strength and insulation performance. This article proposes the Shuffle YOLOv7 model based on the YOLOv7 algorithm for insulator defect detection, aiming to solve the weakness of low precision in traditional object detection algorithms when facing complex backgrounds and small-sized defects. To address the issue of low attention to flashover faults in traditional algorithms, the ShuffleAttention fusion attention mechanism is supplied to concentrate on both intra-channel and inter-channel deep features, and the original PANet structure is replaced with a pyramid which has a bidirectional feature fusion structure to enhance the network’s feature extraction ability. The Focal-EIOU LOSS optimization method focuses on high-quality prior boxes to improve model accuracy, and the effectiveness of the optimization method is verified through ablation experiments. These results of the experiment show that the proposed algorithm achieves varying degrees of performance improvement in terms of precision, recall, average precision, and overall loss compared to mainstream object detection algorithms in detecting insulator damage and flashover.