Partial discharge (PD) is one of the major form expressions of gas-insulated switchgear (GIS) insulation defects. Because PD will accelerate equipment aging, online monitoring and fault diagnosis plays a significant role in ensuring safe and reliable operation of the power system. Owing to feature engineering or vanishing gradients, however, existing pattern recognition methods for GIS PD are complex and inefficient. To improve recognition accuracy, a novel GIS PD pattern recognition method based on a light-scale convolutional neural network (LCNN) without artificial feature engineering is proposed. Firstly, GIS PD data are obtained through experiments and finite-difference time-domain simulations. Secondly, data enhancement is reinforced by a conditional variation auto-encoder. Thirdly, the LCNN structure is applied for GIS PD pattern recognition while the deconvolution neural network is used for model visualization. The recognition accuracy of the LCNN was 98.13%. Compared with traditional machine learning and other deep convolutional neural networks, the proposed method can effectively improve recognition accuracy and shorten calculation time, thus making it much more suitable for the ubiquitous-power Internet of Things and big data.

A porcelain insulator is an important part to ensure that the insulation requirements of power equipment can be met. Under the influence of their structure, porcelain insulators are prone to mechanical damage and cracks, which will reduce their insulation performance. After a long-term operation, crack expansion will eventually lead to breakdown and safety hazards. Therefore, it is of great significance to detect insulator cracks to ensure the safe and reliable operation of a power grid. However, most traditional methods of insulator crack detection involve offline detection or contact measurement, which is not conducive to the online monitoring of equipment. Hyperspectral imaging technology is a noncontact detection technology containing three-dimensional (3D) spatial spectral information, whereby the data provide more information and the measuring method has a higher safety than electric detection methods. Therefore, a model of positioning and state classification of porcelain insulators based on hyperspectral technology is proposed. In this model, image data were used to extract edges to locate cracks, and spectral information was used to classify the surface states of porcelain insulators with EfficientNet. Lastly, crack extraction was realized, and the recognition accuracy of cracks and normal states was 96.9%. Through an analysis of the results, it is proven that the crack detection method of a porcelain insulator based on hyperspectral technology is an effective non-contact online monitoring approach, which has broad application prospects in the era of the Internet of Things with the rapid development of electric power.