An Intelligent Detection Method for Approach Distances of Large Construction Equipment in Substations

The safe approach distance detection of large construction equipment in substations is important to ensure the safety and stability of the power system, as well as to prevent equipment damage, power outages and other accidents. The current method is unable to intelligently distinguish construction equipment from power equipment and realize real-time safety approach distance detection. Therefore, this paper constructs a safety approach distance detection system for large-scale construction equipment in substations based on stereo vision and target detection, and realizes real-time high-precision safe approach distance detection between large-scale construction equipment and electric power equipment. Firstly, the system distinguishes construction equipment from power equipment using a GhostNet-based substation construction target detection model. Secondly, the system obtains spatial information regarding the operation scene using a lightweight stereo matching model based on channel attention, then calculates the spatial surface center of the target based on the spatial information and detection results, and finally calculates the safety approach distance between construction equipment and power equipment. Compared with MobileNetv3-YOLOv4, the map and the recall rate of the proposed method are improved by 13.1% and 29.0%; compared with the AnyNet stereo matching method, the proposed method decreases the end point error and 3 pixels error by 34.2% and 25.8%. The actual data show that the detection speed of the proposed method is 19.35 frames per second, and the mean absolute error is 0.942 m and the mean relative error is 3.802%. This method can accurately measure the safe approach distance in real time in real scenarios to guarantee the safety of personnel and equipment.