Area-based non-maximum suppression algorithm for multi-object fault detection

Unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV)photography has become the main power system inspection method;however,automated fault detection remains a major challenge.Conventional algorithms encounter difficulty in processing all the detected objects in the power transmission lines simultaneously.The object detection method involving deep learning provides a new method for fault detection.However,the traditional non-maximum suppression(NMS)algorithm fails to delete redundant annotations when dealing with objects having two labels such as insulators and dampers.In this study,we propose an area-based non-maximum suppression(A-NMS)algorithm to solve the problem of one object having multiple labels.The A-NMS algorithm is used in the fusion stage of cropping detection to detect small objects.Experiments prove that A-NMS and cropping detection achieve a mean average precision and recall of 88.58%and 91.23%,respectively,in case of the aerial image datasets and realize multi-object fault detection in aerial images.