Instance Segmentation of Irregular Deformable Objects for Power Operation Monitoring Based on Multi-Instance Relation Weighting Module

Electric power operation is necessary for the development of power grid companies, where the safety monitoring of electric power operation is difficult. Irregular deformable objects commonly used in electrical construction, such as safety belts and seines, have a dynamic geometric appearance which leads to the poor performance of traditional detection methods. This paper proposes an end-to-end instance segmentation method using the multi-instance relation weighting module for irregular deformable objects. To solve the problem of introducing redundant background information when using the horizontal rectangular box detector, the Mask Scoring R-CNN is used to perform pixel-level instance segmentation so that the bounding box can accurately surround the irregular objects. Considering that deformable objects in power operation workplaces often appear with construction personnel and the objects have an apparent correlation, a multi-instance relation weighting module is proposed to fuse the appearance features and geometric features of objects so that the relation features between objects are learned end-to-end to improve the segmentation effect of irregular objects. The segmentation mAP on the self-built dataset of irregular deformable objects for electric power operation workplaces reached up to 44.8%. With the same 100,000 training rounds, the bounding box mAP and segmentation mAP improved by 1.2% and 0.2%, respectively, compared with the MS R-CNN. Finally, in order to further verify the generalization performance and practicability of the proposed method, an intelligent monitoring system for the power operation scenes is designed to realize the actual deployment and application of the proposed method. Various tests show that the proposed method can segment irregular deformable objects well.