An Improved U-Net Segmentation Model That Integrates a Dual Attention Mechanism and a Residual Network for Transformer Oil Leakage Detection

Accurately detecting oil leakage from a power transformer is important to maintain its normal operation. Deep learning (DL) methods have achieved satisfactory performance in automatic oil detection, but challenges remain due to the small amount of training data and oil targets with large variations in position, shape, and scale. To manage these issues, we propose a dual attention residual U-net (DAttRes-Unet) within a U-net architecture that extensively uses a residual network as well as spatial and channel-wise attention modules. To overcome the vanishing gradient problem due to deeper layers and a small amount of training data, a residual module from ResNet18 is used to construct the encoder path in the U-net framework. Meanwhile, to overcome the issue of training difficulty for the network, inspired by the advantage of transfer learning, initial network parameters in the encoder are obtained from the pre-trained ResNet18 on the ImageNet dataset. Further, in the decoder path, spatial attention and channel attention are integrated to highlight oil-stained regions while suppressing the background or irrelevant parts/channels. To facilitate the acquisition of the fluorescence images of the transformer, we designed a portable acquisition device integrating an ultraviolet light source and a digital camera. The proposed network is trained on the amount of fluorescence images after data augmentation is used and tested on actual fluorescence images. The experiment results show that the proposed DAttRes-Unet network can recognize oil-stained regions with a high accuracy of 98.49 % for various shapes and scales of oil leakage.