Review of Edge-based Image Segmentation on Electrical Tree Classification in Cross-linked Polyethylene (XLPE) Insulation

Abstract Electrical trees are the degradation events most linked with partial discharge (PD) activity in cross-linked polyethylene (XLPE) insulation of high voltage (HV) cables. To investigate tree structures and forms, study of electrical tree structures for morphological analysis often carried out using optical microscopy. However, since the noise induced by the occlusion and illumination, as well as by non-uniform intensity either from optical device’s setting or the non-standard readout procedure, causes the deterioration of the original microscopy images, resulting in critically loses of information pertaining the tree structures making it difficult to obtained accurate measurement. Image segmentation is one of the potential solutions as it is well-suited for extracting information or certain features from microscopy images. This paper provides review of several segmentation techniques applied on the classification of electrical tree image acquired through lab environment. The works can be separated into three stages. The first step includes the preparation of samples and collection of treeing images by means of real-time microscopy observations. The captured data would then be pre-processed to achieve image binarization. In the next step, image segmentation process is conducted using existing edge-based segmentation methods including Prewitt, Roberts, Canny and Kirsch’s templates. Later, comparative analysis will be performed using IQA (image quality assessment) metrics of accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, false-positive-rate and the Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) as the final step. Performance-wise indicates that Kirsch’s template able to segment most of the treeing pixels with accuracy of 97.63%, 63% sensitivity, 98.18% specificity and 0.46 MCC while showing low pixels misclassification. This result provides better justification for the integration of the edge-based technique in developing image segmentation algorithm well-matched for the electrical tree analysis in the future.