Multi-hidden target detection of transmission line based on improved YOLOv5s and its hardware implementation

Aiming at the problems of poor accuracy of insulator defects, bird's nests and foreign objects detection in transmission lines, and the difficulty of algorithm hardware deployment, this paper proposes an improved YOLOv5s multi-hidden target detection algorithm for transmission lines, firstly, in backbone, the CA attention(Coordinate attention) mechanism is integrated into the C3 module to form the C3CA module, which replaces the C3 module of the sixth and the eighth layers, and enhances the feature fusion capability; secondly, in the neck, the GSConv convolution and VoVGSCSP modules are used to replace the standard convolution and C3 modules to form a BiFPN network, which reduces the floating-point operations of the network; finally, the improved algorithm is deployed into Raspberry Pi and accelerated by OpenVINO to realize the hardware deployment of the algorithm, which is demonstrated by experiments that: the mAP value of the algorithm is comparable to that of YOLOv3, YOLOv5 and YOLOv7 by 4.7%, 1.1%, and 1.2%, respectively. The model size is 14.2MB, and the average time to detect an image in Raspberry Pi is 78.2 milliseconds, which meets the real-time detection requirements.