DGW‐YOLOv8: A small insulator target detection algorithm based on deformable attention backbone and WIoU loss function

Abstract The YOLO series of algorithms have made substantial contributions to the detection of insulator defects in power transmission line operations. However, existing target detection algorithms for the small target detection and low‐quality insulator images encounter difficulties in effectively capturing relevant features, resulting in a higher probability of target loss. To identify and classify defects in the operational state of insulators, an improved YOLOv8 target identification algorithm called DGW‐YOLOv8 is proposed in this paper. The deformable attention backbone of the DGW‐YOLOv8 target identification algorithm is designed by adding the deformable ConvNets v2 module and the global attention mechanism. This addition reduces the feature loss caused by the network feature processing, enhances the sensitivity of the algorithm to small‐scale targets, and reduces the impact caused by the different global positions of the targets. Additionally, to address the problem of low quality of captured images, WIoU v3 is used to replace CIoU in the original YOLOv8 target identification algorithm to optimize the loss function, reduce the degrees of freedom, and improve the network robustness. Experimental results demonstrate that the enhanced YOLOv8 algorithm can achieve an improvement of 2.4% and 5.5% in mAP and mAP50‐95, respectively, compared with the original algorithm.