LeapDetect - An Agile Platform for Inspecting Power Transmission Lines from Drones.

Given a large set of unlabeled images taken by drones for power transmission line inspection, how can we efficiently and cost-friendly develop and deploy defect detection models with high accuracy? To date, power transmission line inspection is increasingly based on drones and there is an expectation of over 100K images taken daily in 2020. These images, in current practice, are generally inspected by inspection engineers. In this paper, we present LeapDetect, an agile platform for rapidly developing, deploying and iteratively upgrading detection models for drone-based power transmission line inspection. The platform consists of a labeling system, an online detection service system, and a training system to cover a complete life cycle of a new coming detection task. It supports building models from a cold start or by an upgrade. LeapDetect has helped us to develop a couple of object detection models for power transmission line inspection. We have demonstrated how LeapDetect helps develop and iteratively upgrade models for power transmission line inspection with two case studies (i.e., bird nest and split pin).