Suitable features selection for monitoring thermal condition of electrical equipment using infrared thermography

•An intelligent thermal imaging based condition monitoring system of electrical equipments is proposed.•Performance of 16 features evaluating from 3 features sets are analyzed.•Suitable features are selected to improve classification performance.•Classification of thermal condition is done using multilayered perceptron networks.

Monitoring the thermal condition of electrical equipment is necessary for maintaining the reliability of electrical system. The degradation of electrical equipment can cause excessive overheating, which can lead to the eventual failure of the equipment. Additionally, failure of equipment requires a lot of maintenance cost, manpower and can also be catastrophic- causing injuries or even deaths. Therefore, the recognition processof equipment conditions as normal and defective is an essential step towards maintaining reliability and stability of the system. The study introduces infrared thermography based condition monitoring of electrical equipment. Manual analysis of thermal image for detecting defects and classifying the status of equipment take a lot of time, efforts and can also lead to incorrect diagnosis results. An intelligent system that can separate the equipment automatically could help to overcome these problems. This paper discusses an intelligent classification system for the conditions of equipment using neural networks. Three sets of features namely first order histogram based statistical, grey level co-occurrence matrix and component based intensity features are extracted by image analysis, which are used as input data for the neural networks. The multilayered perceptron networks are trained using four different training algorithms namely Resilient back propagation, Bayesian Regulazation, Levenberg–Marquardt and Scale conjugate gradient. The experimental results show that the component based intensity features perform better compared to other two sets of features. Finally, after selecting the best features, multilayered perceptron network trained using Levenberg–Marquardt algorithm achieved the best results to classify the conditions of electrical equipment.