An Improved U-Net Model for Infrared Image Segmentation of Wind Turbine Blade

Infrared image segmentation of the wind turbine blade is an important link of wind turbine condition monitoring. Nevertheless, there remain plenty of challenges when the traditional semantic segmentation networks are applied directly to the infrared image segmentation of wind turbine blade, including the blurred boundaries caused by similar thermal radiation of background and blade, the irregularity of edge identification caused by uneven heating, and the hub misidentified as blade. To address these issues, a semantic segmentation neural network based on the basic U-Net is improved for infrared image segmentation of the wind turbine blade. The hierarchical-split depthwise separable convolution block is integrated into the constructed network to have a higher segmentation accuracy. Also, the fusion of convolution layer and batch normalization layer is performed in inference to get a better speed–accuracy tradeoff. The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms all the comparing methods, which further demonstrates that the trained network can achieve superior runtime performance and accurate segmentation with excellent anti-interference performance.