Wire clamps and vibration-proof hammers are key components of high-voltage transmission lines. The wire clips and vibration-proof hammers detected in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) power inspections suffer from small size, scarce edge information, and low recognition accuracy. To address these problems, this paper proposes a small object detection (SOD) model based on the YOLOv8n, called SOD-YOLO. Firstly, an extra small target detection layer was added to YOLOv8, which significantly improves the small target detection accuracy. In addition, in order to enhance the detection speed of the model, the RepVGG/RepConv ShuffleNet (RCS) and a OneShot Aggregation of the RCS (RCSOSA) module were introduced to replace the C2f module in the model backbone and neck shallow networks. Finally, to address the excessive focus on low-quality sample bounding boxes during model training, we introduced Wise-CIoU loss instead of CIoU loss, which improved the detection accuracy of the model. The experimental results indicate that SOD-YOLO achieved a mean average precision of 90.1%, surpassing the YOLOv8n baseline model by 7.5% while maintaining a model parameter count of 3.4 M; the inference speed reached 88.7 frames/s, which meets the requirement of real-time recognition.

The fluctuation of the tide is closely related to the production and life of people in coastal areas, and the change in the tide level will have a significant impact on the safety of infrastructure, ship travel, ecological environment, and other issues. Therefore, it is of great significance to analyze, study, and forecast the change in tide level. Aiming at the complex characteristics of nonlinearity, time-varying dynamics, and uncertainty generated by celestial bodies’ movements and influenced by geographical as well as hydrometeorological factors, this paper proposes a combined model based on variational mode decomposition (VMD) and long short-term memory neural networks (LSTM). A tidal level prediction procedure is proposed by combining the harmonic analysis method with a neural network and takes the point tide data of Luchao Port from 2021 to 2022 as the applied data. First, the VMD algorithm decomposes the tidal level data into model components. Then, the LSTM model is used to predict each component. Finally, the predicted value of each component is superposed to obtain the final prediction result. Standard evaluation indexes were used to analyze the performance of the proposed model. The model’s RMSE, MAE, MAPE, and R² were 0.0385, 0.0267, 5.8327, and 99.91%, respectively, superior to other compared models (BP, SVM, and LSTM). This study can provide a reference for tidal level prediction. These results show that the VMD-LSTM model is an effective and reliable tidal level prediction tool with considerable potential in offshore engineering and maritime management.

In high-voltage transmission lines, the tension tower needs to withstand the tension load of the overhead power line for a long time, which is prone to damage, and it is an important part of the inspection in the circuit inspection. In the modern circuit inspection process, operation and maintenance personnel mostly use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to photograph various parts of the tension tower, obtain inspection images, and manually classify and name the massive inspection images, which is low in accuracy and efficiency. Based on the above problems, this paper collects a large number of real-life UAV inspection images of various parts of a tension tower, and proposes the Stower-13 inspection image dataset, which is used to train the classification model to achieve automatic classification and naming of inspection images. Based on this dataset, this paper also proposes an improved MobileViT model, in which the Scale-Correlated Pyramid Convolution Block Attention Block (SCPCbam) module is introduced, which adds the Convolution Block Attention Module (CBAM) to the four branches of the original Scale-Correlated Pyramid Convolution (SCPC) module, so as to strengthen the ability of image multi-scale information extraction and improve the classification accuracy. This paper discusses a number of experiments on the model, and the experimental results show that the dataset proposed in this paper helps the model to understand the feature information. At the same time, the improved MobileViT model has a strong ability to extract image spatial feature information, the classification accuracy is higher than that of other models of the same type, so it is able to cope with a wide range of problems that arise in the course of practice, and it meets the practical needs of automatically naming transmission line inspection images.

To enhance the performance of UAVs in detecting insulator self-explosion defects during power inspections, this paper proposes an insulator self-explosion defect recognition algorithm, SDA-YOLO, based on an improved YOLOv11s network. First, the SODL is added to YOLOv11 to fuse shallow features with deeper features, thereby improving the model’s focus on small-sized self-explosion defect features. The OBB is also employed to reduce interference from the complex background. Second, the DBB module is incorporated into the C3k2 module in the backbone to extract target features through a multi-branch parallel convolutional structure. Finally, the AIFI module replaces the C2PSA module, effectively directing and aggregating information between channels to improve detection accuracy and inference speed. The experimental results show that the average accuracy of SDA-YOLO reaches 96.0%, which is higher than the YOLOv11s baseline model of 6.6%. While maintaining high accuracy, the inference speed of SDA-YOLO can reach 93.6 frames/s, which achieves the purpose of the real-time detection of insulator faults.