Performing ultrasonic nondestructive testing experiments on insulators and then using machine learning algorithms to classify and identify the signals is an important way to achieve an intelligent diagnosis of insulators. However, in most cases, we can obtain only a limited number of data from the experiments, which is insufficient to meet the requirements for training an effective classification and recognition model. In this paper, we start with an existing data augmentation method called DBA (for dynamic time warping barycenter averaging) and propose a new data enhancement method called AWDBA (adaptive weighting DBA). We first validated the proposed method by synthesizing new data from insulator sample datasets. The results show that the AWDBA proposed in this study has significant advantages relative to DBA in terms of data enhancement. Then, we used AWDBA and two other data augmentation methods to synthetically generate new data on the original dataset of insulators. Moreover, we compared the performance of different machine learning algorithms for insulator health diagnosis on the dataset with and without data augmentation. In the SVM algorithm especially, we propose a new parameter optimization method based on GA (genetic algorithm). The final results show that the use of the data augmentation method can significantly improve the accuracy of insulator defect identification.
Keywords: DTW barycenter averaging; adaptive weighting DBA; data augmentation; defect detection; insulator; support vector machines with genetic algorithm.