Power Transmission Lines Foreign Object Intrusion Detection Method for Drone Aerial Images Based on Improved YOLOv8 Network

With the continuous growth of electricity demand, the safety and stability of transmission lines have become increasingly important. To ensure the reliability of power supply, it is essential to promptly detect and address foreign object intrusions on transmission lines, such as tree branches, kites, and balloons. Addressing the issues where foreign objects can cause power outages and severe safety accidents, as well as the inefficiency, time consumption, and labor-intensiveness of traditional manual inspection methods, especially in large-scale power transmission lines, we propose an enhanced YOLOv8-based model for detecting foreign objects. This model incorporates the Swin Transformer, AFPN (Asymptotic Feature Pyramid Network), and a novel loss function, Focal SIoU, to improve both the accuracy and real-time detection of hazards. The integration of the Swin Transformer into the YOLOv8 backbone network significantly improves feature extraction capabilities. The AFPN enhances the multi-scale feature fusion process, effectively integrating information from different levels and improving detection accuracy, especially for small and occluded objects. The introduction of the Focal SIoU loss function optimizes the model’s training process, enhancing its ability to handle hard-to-classify samples and uncertain predictions. This method achieves efficient automatic detection of foreign objects by comprehensively utilizing multi-level feature information and optimized label matching strategies. The dataset used in this study consists of images of foreign objects on power transmission lines provided by a power supply company in Jilin, China. These images were captured by drones, offering a comprehensive view of the transmission lines and enabling the collection of detailed data on various foreign objects. Experimental results show that the improved YOLOv8 network has high accuracy and recall rates in detecting foreign objects such as balloons, kites, and bird nests, while also possessing good real-time processing capabilities.