An Instance Segmentation Method for Insulator Defects Based on an Attention Mechanism and Feature Fusion Network

Among the existing insulator defect detection methods, the automatic detection of inspection robots based on the instance segmentation algorithm is relatively more efficient, but the problem of the limited accuracy of the segmentation algorithm is still a bottleneck for increasing inspection efficiency. Therefore, we propose a single-stage insulator instance defect segmentation method based on both an attention mechanism and improved feature fusion network. YOLACT is selected as the basic instance segmentation model. Firstly, to improve the segmentation speed, MobileNetV2 embedded with an scSE attention mechanism is introduced as the backbone network. Secondly, a new feature map that combines semantic and positional information is obtained by improving the FPN module and fusing the feature maps of each layer, during which, an attention mechanism is introduced to further improve the quality of the feature map. Thirdly, in view of the problems that affect the insulator segmentation, a Restrained-IoU (RIoU) bounding box loss function which covers the area deviation, center deviation, and shape deviation is designed for object detection. Finally, for the validity evaluation of the proposed method, experiments are performed on the insulator defect data set. It is shown in the results that the improved algorithm achieves a mask accuracy improvement of 5.82% and a detection speed of 37.4 FPS, which better complete the instance segmentation of insulator defect images.