Defects in high voltage transmission line components such as cracked

insulators, broken wires rope, and corroded power line joints, arc traces, broken
shed, are very common due to continuous exposure of these components to
harsh environmental conditions. Consequently, they pose a great threat to
humans and the environment. Long distance transmission of electric power
mainly adopts high voltage and ultrahigh voltage overhead power lines. Line
safe operation is the guarantee of long-distance transmission. Running state,
setting defects and condition of transmission line will affect the stable
operation, so the monitoring of electric power line is very important. The
traditional patrol method mainly relies on human monitoring. This paper
presents a real-time aerial power line inspection system that aims to detect
power line components such as insulators (polymer and porcelain), splitters,
damper-weights, and /power lines, and then analyse these transmission line
components for potential defects. The proposed system employs a gesture-
controlled drone which uses image processing method to recognize the fault
condition in the transmission line. The drone's control system was designed to
recognize gestures and translate them into specific commands for the drone. The
ADXL335 accelerometer was used to detect the orientation and movement of
the user's hand, which was then translated into specific commands such as pitch,
roll, and yaw. This system reduces human efforts and increases the probability
of finding transmission line faults which is very beneficial and allows us to
excel in different aspect of monitoring potential transmission line faults. The
detected components are then analysed using novel defect detection algorithms,
presented in this paper. Results show that the proposed detection and
localization system is robust against highly cluttered environment, while the
proposed defect analyser outperforms similar researches in terms of defect
detection precision and recall. With the help of the proposed automatic defect
analysing system, manual inspection time can be reduced.