The accurate and efficient detection of power lines and towers in aerial drone images with complex backgrounds is crucial for the safety of power grid operations and low-altitude drone flights. In this paper, we propose a new method that enhances the deep learning segmentation model UNet algorithm called TLSUNet. We enhance the UNet algorithm by using a lightweight backbone structure to extract the features and then reconstructing them with contextual information features. In this network model, to reduce its parameters and computational complexity, we adopt DFC-GhostNet (Dubbed Full Connected) as the backbone feature extraction network, which is composed of the DFC-GhostBottleneck structure and uses asymmetric convolution to capture long-distance targets in transmission lines, thus enhancing the model’s extraction capability. Additionally, we design a hybrid feature extraction module based on convolution and a transformer to refine deep semantic features and improve the model’s ability to locate towers and transmission lines in complex environments. Finally, we adopt the up-sampling operator CARAFE (Content-Aware Re-Assembly of FEature) to improve segmentation accuracy by enhancing target restoration using contextual neighborhood pixel information correlation under feature decoding. Our experiments on public aerial photography datasets demonstrate that the improved model requires only 8.3% of the original model’s computational effort and has only 21.4% of the original model’s parameters, while achieving a reduction in inference speed delay by 0.012 s. The segmentation metrics also showed significant improvements, with the mIOU improving from 79.75% to 86.46% and the mDice improving from 87.83% to 92.40%. These results confirm the effectiveness of our proposed method.

In the field of wind turbine surface defect detection, most existing defect detection algorithms have a single solution with poor generalization to the dilemma of insufficient defect samples and have unsatisfactory precision for small and concealed defects. Inspired by meta-learning ideology, we devised a cross-task training strategy. By exploring the common properties between tasks, the hypothesis space shrinks so that the needed sample size that satisfies a reliable empirical risk minimizer is reduced. To improve the training efficiency, a depth metric-based classification method is specially designed to find a sample-matching feature space with a good similarity measure by cosine distance. Additionally, a real-time feedback session is innovatively added to the model training loop, which performs information enhancement and filtering according to the task relevance. With dynamic activation mapping, it alleviates the information loss during traditional pooling operations, thus helping to avoid the missed detection of small-scale targets. Experimental results show that the proposed method has significantly improved the defect recognition ability under few-shot training conditions.

In this paper, a novel AI-based power reserve control strategy is proposed for photovoltaic (PV) power generation systems participating in the frequency regulation (FR) of microgrids. The proposed strategy uses a frequency response module to determine the target power reserve ratio of the PV system based on microgrid frequency deviation, as well as a power reserve control module to obtain the target duty cycle, which is input to the BOOST converter. The use of artificial neural networks (ANN) in the power reserve control module enables the PV system to work at a specified power reserve ratio, producing appropriate power and mitigating frequency fluctuations in the microgrid. Additionally, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm is employed as the decision maker for variable step-size control and initial power reserve ratio determination. Simulations were performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, demonstrating a significant reduction in average frequency deviation by 72.36% when subjected to random variations in irradiance intensity and load conditions. Overall, the proposed AI-based power reserve control strategy has good potential for practical applications in real-world microgrids, promoting the absorption of new energy led by PV and reducing the phenomenon of light abandonment.

Edge computing can avoid the long-distance transmission of massive data and problems with large-scale centralized processing. Hence, defect identification for insulators with object detection models based on deep learning is gradually shifting from cloud servers to edge computing devices. Therefore, we propose a detection model for insulators and defects designed to deploy on edge computing devices. The proposed model is improved on the basis of YOLOv4-tiny, which is suitable for edge computing devices, and the detection accuracy of the model is improved on the premise of maintaining a high detection speed. First, in the neck network, the inverted residual module is introduced to perform feature fusion to improve the positioning ability of the insulators. Then, a high-resolution detection output head is added to the original model to enhance its ability to detect defects. Finally, the prediction boxes are post-processed to incorporate split object boxes for large-scale insulators. In an experimental evaluation, the proposed model achieved an mAP of 96.22% with a detection speed of 10.398 frames per second (FPS) on an edge computing device, which basically meets the requirements of insulator and defect detection scenarios in edge computing devices.

This paper focus on direct current (DC) filter grounding faults to propose a novel dilated normalized residual convolutional neural network (DRNCNN) fault diagnosis model for high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission systems. To address the insufficiency of the traditional model’s receptive field in dealing with high-dimensional and nonlinear data, this paper incorporates dilated convolution and batch normalization (BN), significantly enhancing the CNN’s capability to capture complex spatial features. Furthermore, this paper integrates residual connections and parameter rectified linear units (PReLU) to optimize gradient propagation and mitigate the issue of gradient vanishing during training. These innovative improvements, embodied in the DRNCNN model, substantially increase the accuracy of fault detection, achieving a diagnostic accuracy rate of 99.28%.