Detection of bird species related to transmission line faults based on lightweight convolutional neural network

Abstract Efficient bird damage prevention of transmission lines is a long‐term challenge for power grid operation and maintenance. An approach combined lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN), image processing and object detection is presented in this paper to detect typical bird species related to transmission line faults. An image dataset of 20 bird species that threaten transmission line security is constructed. The YOLOv4‐tiny algorithm model is constructed and trained combining stage‐wise training, mosaic data enhancement, cosine annealing, and label smoothing. The mean average precision (mAP) can reach 92.04% on the test set by adjusting the parameters of the training process. Then, the validity of the proposed method is verified according to the test results and performance indexes by comparing with other methods, including Faster RCNN, SSD, YOLOv4 etc. Some image pre‐processing methods such as motion blur, defocus blur, contrast and brightness adjustment are used to simulate the scenarios in practical engineering applications. The proposed method can detect bird species perched around transmission lines with high‐efficiency, which is useful for differential prevention of bird‐related outages of power grids.