Work

Weather-Robust Foreign Object Detection on Transmission Lines via Physics-Driven Complex Wavelet Unrolling

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Foreign object detection during unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) grid inspection suffers from severe visual degradation under adverse weather conditions, such as haze and heavy rain. Existing approaches often struggle to distinguish target textures from weather-induced noise, leading to critical performance drops. We propose the Physics-Prior Complex Wavelet Unrolling Decoupling Module (PCW-UDM) to enable highly robust detection in complex environments. By leveraging the 2D dual-tree complex wavelet transform (2D-DTCWT), our method decouples degraded features into low-frequency and multi-directional high-frequency sub-bands. To tackle haze, we design a Physics-Guided Low-Frequency Dehazing (PGLD) branch that physically inverses the atmospheric scattering process. To combat rain, we introduce the LISTA-Unrolled High-Frequency Deraining (LUHD) branch, which innovatively applies deep unrolled sparse optimisation to remove directional rain streaks without distorting the structural phase. A novel spatio-temporal cross-domain consistency loss further guarantees weather-invariant feature alignment. Extensive evaluations on synthesised adverse datasets and the real-world RTTS dataset prove that our PCW-UDM-equipped network fundamentally overcomes the semantic conflicts of traditional cascaded restoration-detection paradigms, achieving state-of-the-art detection precision and robustness against extreme weather conditions.

Source: Sensors

DOI: 10.3390/s26102942

Authors: Xiaoxiong Zhou, Junchi He, Cheng Cheng, Guangming Zhang

Institutions: Nanjing Tech University, State Grid Jiangsu Electric Power (China)

Language: English

Topic: Power Line Inspection Robots

Subfield: Mechanical Engineering

Field: Engineering

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDG: Industry, innovation and infrastructure

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $3,137