A fault diagnosis of transmission line spacers based on visible-light images

Spacer is one of the important electric power fittings, which is used to fix power lines and restrain breeze vibration. Using visible-light image as the object, a method of detecting spacer fracture is proposed. After removing the power line by morphological approaches, the skeleton of spacer is obtained by geometric correction and thinning algorithm. At last, a weighted invariant moment characteristic is used to identify spacer fracture. Experimental result shows that the proposed method is effective, which would make it possible to detect the fault of spacers by a plane with camera.