Detecting Faulty Tape-around Weatherproofing Cables by Computer Vision

Abstract: More cables will be installed owing to setting up more radio towers when it comes to 5G. However, a large proportion of radio units are constructed high in the open space, which makes it difficult for human technicians to maintain the systems. Under these circumstances, automatic detections of errors among radio cabinets are crucial. Cables and connectors are usually covered with weatherproofing tapes, and one of the most common problems is that the tapes are not closely rounded on the cables and connectors. This makes the tape go out of the cable and look like a waving flag, which may seriously damage the radio systems. The thesis aims at detecting this flagging-tape and addressing the issues. This thesis experiments two methods for object detection, the convolutional neural network as well as the OpenCV and image processing. The former uses YOLO (You Only Look Once) network for training and testing, while in the latter method, the connected component method is applied for the detection of big objects like the cables and line segment detector is responsible for the flagging-tape boundary extraction. Multiple parameters, structurally and functionally unique, were developed to find the most suitable way to meet the requirement. Furthermore, precision and recall are used to evaluate the performance of the system output quality, and in order to improve the requirements, larger experiments were performed using different parameters. The results show that the best way of detecting faulty weatherproofing is with the image processing method by which the recall is 71% and the precision reaches 60%. This method shows better performance than YOLO dealing with flagging-tape detection. The method shows the great potential of this kind of object detection, and a detailed discussion regarding the limitation is also presented in the thesis.