State inspection for transmission lines based on independent component analysis

Monitoring transmission towers is of great importance to prevent severe thefts on them and ensure the reliability and safety of the power grid operation. Independent component analysis (ICA) is a method for finding underlying factors or components from multivariate statistical data based on dimension reduction methods, and it is applicable to extract the non-stationary signals. FastICA based on negentropy is presented to effectively extract and separate the vibration signals caused by human activity in this paper. A new method combined empirical mode decomposition (EMD) technique with the adaptive threshold method is applied to extract the vibration pulses, and suppress the interference signals. The practical tests demonstrate that the method proposed in the paper is effective in separating and extracting the vibration signals.