This study proposes a crack identification algorithm to analyze the surface condition of porcelain insulators and to efficiently visualize cracks. The proposed image processing algorithm for crack identification consists of two primary steps. In the first step, the brightness is eliminated by converting the image to the lab color space. Then, the background is removed by the K-means clustering method. After that, the optimum image treatment is applied using morphological image processing and median filtering to remove unnecessary noise, such as blobs. In the second step, the preprocessed image is converted to grayscale, and any cracks present in the image are identified. Next, the region properties, such as the number of pixels and the ratio of the major to the minor axis, are used to separate the cracks from the noise. Using this image processing algorithm, the precision of crack identification for all the sample images was approximately 80%, and the F1 score was approximately 70. Thus, this method can be helpful for efficient crack monitoring.

In recent years, increasing electricity use has led to considerable interest in green energy. In order to effectively supply, cut off, and operate an electric power system, many electric power facilities such as gas insulation switch (GIS), cable, and large substation facilities with higher densities are being developed to meet demand. However, because of the increased use of aging electric power facilities, safety problems are emerging. Electromagnetic wave and leakage current detection are mainly used as sensing methods to detect live-line partial discharges. Although electromagnetic sensors are excellent at providing an initial diagnosis and very reliable, it is difficult to precisely determine the fault point, while leakage current sensors require a connection to the ground line and are very vulnerable to line noise. The partial discharge characteristic in particular is accompanied by statistical irregularity, and it has been reported that proper statistical processing of data is very important. Therefore, in this paper, we present the results of analyzing Φ-q-n cluster distributions of partial discharge characteristics by using K-means clustering to develop an expert partial discharge diagnosis system generated in a GIS facility.