A swin transformer based bird nest detection approach with unmanned aerial vehicle images for power distribution and pole towers

Abstract The authors propose a novel object detection algorithm for identifying bird nests in medium voltage power line aerial images, which is crucial for ensuring the safe operation of the power grid. The algorithm utilises an improved Swin Transformer as the main feature extraction network of Fast R‐CNN, further enhanced with a channel attention and modified binary self‐attention mechanism to improve the feature representation ability. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on a newly constructed image dataset of medium voltage transmission lines containing bird nests, which are annotated and classified. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves satisfied accuracy and robustness in recognising bird nests compared to traditional algorithms.