2009 International Conference of Soft Computing and Pattern Recognition

Automatic Diagnosis System of Electrical Equipment using Infrared Thermography

Ying-Chieh Chou

Leehter Yao

Dept. of Electrical Engineering

National Taipei University of Technology
Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C
{t5319015, ltyao}@ntut.edu.tw
technique, defective parts can be detected through simple
observation of infrared images and there is no need to shut
down the operation of a facility to look inside the equipment
for inspection.
The fact that many power installations require a large
amount of manpower to conduct inspections, most power
companies usually assign outside contractors to do electrical
inspections for them. After outside contractors have
submitted their inspection reports, the results of the
inspections are further evaluated one by one by power
companies to confirm their validity and to give approval for
repair. Experienced personnel still have to take a lot of time
to complete the difficult work of evaluation. Therefore, a
system known as Infrared Thermography Anomaly
Detection Algorithm (ITADA) is proposed by this paper.
This computerized system uses a combination of
Artificial Intelligence and digital image processing
techniques so that the system can receive any amount of
infrared images as input data before performing automatic
inspections on them. The defective parts are detected by
determining which of these areas on the infrared images are
with higher temperatures than the normal prescribed levels.
Inspection results are classified into different categories
depending on the levels of temperatures detected that tell the
power companies the seriousness of each situation in each of
these areas. The advantage of the system is to enable power
companies to carry out their repair and maintenance in a
timely and cost effective manner.
Infrared thermography technology is a technology that
uses infrared sensors and optical lenses in a constructed
electrical circuitry to capture images of thermal objects based
on temperature variations. Infrared thermal camera stores the
infrared pictures of thermal objects as thermal images that
the human can see in order to understand the inside
conditions of the objects. With the images, inspectors can
analyze the temperature variations of thermal objects to look
for defective parts.
Infrared thermography technology is a nondestructive
inspection technique [2]. The inspection can be conducted
efficiently by keeping a distance from the inspected
equipment. There is no need to halt equipment operation
while an inspection is going on. Since the collection of
information for inspection is by telemetry, hazardous
operations can be avoided [3]. For these reasons, Infrared
thermography is widely used for many applications
involving preventive maintenance [4].

AbstractAn automatic diagnosis system is proposed by this

paper for a more and more important issue, preventive
maintenance. Every year, various workplace accidents happen
due to undesirable maintenance. No matter how stringent the
rules governing the maintenance of electrical equipment may
be, it is always a challenge for the power industry due to the
large number of electrical equipment and the shortage of
manpower. In this paper, an automatic diagnosis system for
testing electrical equipment for defects is proposed. Based on
nondestructive inspection, infrared thermography is used to
automate the diagnosis process. Thermal image processing
based on statistical methods and morphological image
processing technique are used to identify hotspots and the
reference temperature. Qualitative and quantitative analyses
are carried out on the gathered information and inspection
results are presented after being processed by the diagnosis.
The thermal diagnosis system proposed by this paper can be
used at the various power facilities to improve inspection
efficiency as illustrated in the experiment results.
Keywords- Infrared; Thermography; Image Processing;
Preventive maintenance; Automatic Diagnosis.

I.

INTRODUCTION

In recent years, the repair and maintenance of equipment

at important facilities has been a primary area of concern. Of
these facilities, the repair and maintenance of equipment at
power transmission facilities is listed as a task with the
highest priority because our abilities to continue to enjoy the
quality of life we are enjoying now depend solely on the
continuous operation of these equipment in the future. Power
installations are usually located in every corner of small
villages and big cities. This is because electricity has to be
provided to wherever the consumers are conducting their
indoor or outdoor activities, leading to tens of thousands of
such facilities. To provide proper maintenance for many
equipment at these facilities has been an important objective
for every power company, but such a goal has always been a
challenging one.
The repair and maintenance of a facility can be classified
under three different categories: when equipment
malfunction, timebased, and condition-based maintenance
[1]. The most popular one is condition-based maintenance,
also known as preventive maintenance. Infrared
thermography technique is widely used in preventive
maintenance for the advantage of carrying out quick,
accurate, and wide area inspections by telemetry. With this
978-0-7695-3879-2/09 $26.00 2009 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/SoCPaR.2009.41

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show vivid distinction between the main objects and their

backgrounds must not be included in an inspector report.
The abnormal conditions from infrared detections are
usually explained by the extreme temperature values. For
example, overheating that occurs to a certain area of a power
installation is the result of the higher resistance encountered
at a defective part where current flow is resisted [6].
Moreover, when the surrounding temperature of a piece of
refrigeration equipment falls below an acceptable level, one
of the likely causes is a coolant leakage from a damaged
sidewall of the equipment. This paper only discusses the
overheating issue caused by defective parts since it only
focuses on inspection of electrical equipment and power
facilities. By analyzing extreme temperature variations, our
objective is to identify probable location of defective parts
for those staff people responsible for repair and maintenance
to carry out preventive maintenance [7].

This paper is organized as follows. Section II contains a

brief summary of the problem statement. Section III states
the main algorithm for anomaly detection. Finally, the
experiment results and conclusion are shown in Section IVV. The results of our experiments are as shown to justify the
effectiveness of the thermal diagnosis system applied at
various power facilities to improve inspection efficiency.
II.

PROBLEM STATEMENT

A typical report usually contains an infrared

thermography and a visible spectrum photo, as indicated in
Fig. 1.

Figure 1. A Infrared thermography and a visible spectrum photo.

The infrared thermography is usually converted into

colorful images using a color palette for human observation.
In order to expedite image processing steps, the colorful
images are again converted into gray images as shown in Fig.
2.

Figure 3. The capacitor.

Figure 4. The transformer.

Figure 2. The hotspot and the reference point.

In this paper, our experiment samples include capacitors,

transformers, and other power transmission equipment as
illustrated in Fig. 3-5. When thermal images are captured
inappropriately, the image color can appear to be too bright
or too dark, monotonous [5]. These thermal images with
flaws tend to increase the amount of mistakes inspectors
made by making wrongful judgments during an inspection. It
is suggested by this paper that thermal images that do not

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A morphological image processing theory is adopted [9]

in order to extract the hotspots. Firstly, the maximum pixel
value of the image has to be determined as shown in (3).

Figure 5. An electric cord.

For inspection, the diagnosis system needs to first find a

hotspot (normally an overheated connecting point) and to
choose a reference point from the neighborhood of the
connecting point. The reference point has to be picked from
an area with the same structure and similar features as the
hotspot which is as shown in Fig. 2. The purpose of this
diagnosis system is to replace the time consuming manual
detection of defective parts. Hence, the Infrared
Thermography Anomaly Detection Algorithm (ITADA) is
developed to automate the diagnosis process.
III.

Thot gray =

1 if ( x, y ) = Thot gray
0 ( x, y ) =
0 otherwise
0 x < W , 0 y < H

(4)

Calculate the connected components with the seed image

0 in the foreground image with the experiential limit of
neighbors difference of gradient value 16, as dictated in (5)
where k is the iteration times. k 1 B expresses a dilation
process. If k 1 ( x, y ), 0 x < W , 0 y < H is equal to 1
then dilates itself according to k 1 ( x + s, y + t ) ,
s = t = [1,1] , s and t are discrete integers, due to B is an
8-neighbors mask. C is a constraint of the experiential limit
of neighbors difference of gradient value 16 in the
foreground image .
k = ( k 1 B ) C , k =1,2,3,"

(5)

A dilation point would be ineffective if the constraint C not

be satisfied. The algorithm has converged when
k = k 1 then gets the converged image . Finally,

(1)

represents the image of all hotspots connected

components as shown in Fig. 9.
Define the every connected components area of
image as the sets of points Ai , i =1" J , J = number of
hotspots. Considering the noises elimination, the amount of
every connected component in is calculated as
Di , i =1" J then the small noise can be ignored and the
maximum hotspot would be found, as indicated in (6).

0 x < W , 0 y < H
Likewise, all the pixel values of image are set to 1
when the pixel values are greater than T . On the contrary,
the pixel values are set to 0 when they are less than T . In
order to obtain object image from image and , the
following formula is used:.
( x, y ) if ( x, y ) = 1
( x, y ) =
if ( x, y ) = 0
0

(3)

seed image 0 can be made to calculate the connected

components, as shown in (4).

The implementation of Infrared Thermography

Anomaly Detection Algorithm (ITADA) by the paper is
based on the principle of Otsus statistical threshold selection
algorithm using gray-level histograms [8]. The reason for
using this algorithm on power facilities is their equipment
always have temperatures higher than the environment. By
using a thresholding method, the image of the main object
can be separated from its background.
Experienced photographer normally takes picture image
that shows a clear distinction between the main object and
the background of the picture as shown in Fig. 2. The
ITADA algorithm can be used to easily separate the object
from the background.
Let represents the original image and represents
the extracted binary image of the main object from . As
shown in (1), T is the threshold value by Otsus method;
W is image width and H is image height. Since this is a
digital image, x and y are discrete integers.

1 if ( x, y ) > T
0 if ( x, y ) T

( ( x, y ) )

According to the maximum hot value Thot gray , an initial

INFRARED THERMOGRAPHY ANOMALY DETECTION

ALGORITHM (ITADA)

( x, y ) =

max

0 x <W ,0 y < H

= arg max ( Di ) , Di 5

(2)

1 i J

0 x < W , 0 y < H

(6)

Sometimes, the number of hotspots would be lots

because of the characteristic of infrared technology. There
are three sources of energy that can be detected from the
thermal object; energy emitted from the object itself, energy
reflected from the object itself, and energy transmitted by the
object [10]. Since infrared imaging technique measures the
radiation from the surface of a thermal object, some infrared
parameter like emissivity, reflectivity and transmissivity

After the separation process by (1)-(2), is the thermal

image of the inspected equipment without background as
shown in Fig. 8. Excluding the hot area or the brighter spot
observed, every part of the main object has a small
difference in temperature. After subtracting the hotspots
effect, the average temperature of the main object comes
close to that of the temperature of the reference point.

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There are two ways to take a temperature measurement.

The first is Quantitative, which is to take the exact
temperature values of objects. This method is usually not so
important during thermal inspection since the accuracy of
these values is often affected by environmental factors such
as current environmental temperature, humidity, and
emissivityetc [12].
The second type is Qualitative, which takes the relative
temperature values of a hotspot with respect to other parts of
the equipment with similar conditions. The second type is
widely used in most of the actual applications. Hence,
qualitative measurement is adopted in this paper to analyze
the captured temperature values. In general cases and the
quantitative measurement is to analyze the anomalously high
temperature.
Even under normal condition, the accuracy of
temperature values obtained by infrared thermal camera is
low. A qualitative method is implemented to curb this
deficiency. After the hotspot temperature Thot and reference
point temperature Tref have been obtained from (1)-(11),

must be accounted for when converting radiation rate into

actual temperature values [11]. Some fake hotspots would be
generated due to the electrical installation material and
special structure that cause the high reflection rate can
jeopardize truly infrared emission measurement.
Use an experiential value 5 to eliminate the noises then
search the maximum area of the rests. The maximum
hotspots area is A . It means that the diagnosis result of this
case is normal when A = . Reset the Thot grey with
following (7) which can approach the manual action.

Thot grey =

W 1 H 1

( x, y ), ( x, y ) A

D x =0 y =0

(7)

Hence, the connected components of hotspots are got, we

can find out the Tref grey , as shown in (8), due to a small
difference in temperature from every part of the main object
besides the hot area is observed.

M =

W 1 H 1

( x, y),

if ( x, y ) 1

temperature difference ratio Tr and temperature difference

T is defined as follows (12)-(13):

(8)

x =0 y =0

Tr =

M is the average temperature value of the object image

besides the hotspots image * .

N=

Thot Tref
Tref

(12)

100%

T = Thot Tref

W 1 H 1

( ( x, y) ( x, y) )
*

(9)

(13)

The following qualitative and quantitative rules are

applied to classify the different conditions in relation to a
thermal inspection according to the experiential value, as
indicated in Table I-II:

x =0 y =0

N is the amount of pixels in the object image in

addition to the hotspots image * .
Tref gray =

M
N

TABLE I.

(10)

Tref gray is an average gray value of the object image

except for the hotspots image * .

When thermal images are represented by gray-level scale,
the gray-level values range from [0, 255], and the values are
not the actual temperature values. To obtain actual
temperature values, actual highest temperature Tmax and the
lowest temperature Tmin are needed to be achieved before the
actual temperature can be calculated by the formula
presented as follows:

Treal = Tmin +

Tgray level
255

(Tmax Tmin )

Type of
Conditions

Tr Variations

T Variations

Normal

Tr < 9%

T < 10o C

Warning

9% Tr < 90%

10o C T < 25o C

Abnormal

90% Tr

25o C T

TABLE II.

(11)

CONDITIONS OF QUALITATIVE MEASUREMENT

CONDITIONS OF QUANTITATIVE MEASUREMENT

Type of
Conditions

Temperature Variations

Normal

Thot < 60o C

Warning

60o C Thot < 90o C

Abnormal

90o C Thot

Table III is a list for repairing strategy for the various

equipment conditions.

The real temperature Thot and Tref can be computed using

the equation (11).

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TABLE III.

STRATEGY FOR VARIOUS SITUATIONS

Four hotspots are observed in this figure. The maximum

area is an obvious defect except for the others. According to
(6)-(11), the hotspot temperature Thot and reference point

Equipment
Condition

Weighting

Strategy

Normal

None

temperature Tref have been obtained. Thot is 56.7578 o C and

Warning

Tref is 37.0202 o C . Following the (12)-(15) and Table I-III,

Abnormal

Short term follow-up on repair

and maintenance required
Highly dangerous,
require immediate maintenance

the final diagnosis is diagnosed as Abnormal.

Using the above three rules, we can get three conditions

and three weightings WTr , WT , and WThot . Define the
equipment condition function Ec ( w) as (14), w is the
weighting of condition. The final condition Ec ( ws ) is
corresponding to the maximum weightings of them for
cautious diagnosis as indicated in (15).
Ec ( w), w = 0,1, 2

ws = max WTr ,WT , WThot

Infrared
Image

Separate the
equipment from
infrared image

Find connected
components from
hottest pixels.

Equipment
image

(14)

Hottest
connected
components

(15)

Find the maximum

area without
too small ones.

Fail

Succes

IV. EXPERIMENTS
In the section, a diagnosis sample is processed to express
the how the diagnosis system working. An infrared image of
the capacitors as shown in Fig. 6 is processed with the
diagnosis algorithm due to the capacitor is one of the typical
electrical equipment. The flowchart of all diagnosis process
is illustrated in Fig. 7.

Average all pixels

in equipment
image besides
maximum hottest
connected
component

The
reference
temperature

Maximum
hottest
connected
component

Average
all pixels in
maximum hottest
connected
component

The hot
temperature
Dianosis

Abnormal

Warning

Normal

Figure 7. Diagnosis flowchart.

Figure 6. The capacitor.

The experiment has 100 samples of thermal images;

including capacitors, transformers, and other power
transmission equipment, as shown in section II. Define as
the weighting difference in (16). ws is the weighting of
system diagnosis, as shown in (15), and wm is the weighting
of manual diagnosis. The results are indicated in following
Table IV. The evaluation results show that about 91%

First, the original infrared image is separated as

foreground and background with threshold T then stored the
foreground in image as shown in Fig. 8 according to the
(1)-(2).
In next step, draw the highest heat points then connect
the nearly similar pixels by (3)-(5). The hottest areas are
marked as red in the Fig. 9.

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accuracy and 9% mistake including 8% over caution and 1%

less caution.

= ws wm
TABLE IV.

V.

(16)

EXPERIMENT RESULT

-2

-1

Amount of
samples

91

Statistics
Correct

Wrong

Accuracy Rate

91

91%

CONCLUSION

In this paper, a computerized diagnosis system is

developed to inspect electrical equipment using infrared
thermography and to present infrared thermography report
for electrical inspectors. A breakdown of the results shows
that about 91% accuracy and 9% mistake including 8% over
caution and 1% less caution. The diagnosis was performed
over capacitors, transformers, and other power transmission
equipment. The infrared information will be more useful to
electrical inspectors if they are warned about the
inappropriately captured thermal images. For future
development, artificial neural network or pattern recognition
technology will be used to improve the outcome of the
diagnosis results. In future, infrared thermal camera and the
computer diagnosis software can be further combined as one
and stored in a small mobile device for the device to be
carried around by electrical inspectors. If this diagnosis
system can be used everywhere, infrared thermography
inspection will play a bigger role in preventive maintenance.
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T = 77

Figure 9. Location of the hottest areas.

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