Power Quality Composite Disturbance Identification Based on CWT–STFT Dual-Modal Fusion and a Lightweight Network

With the continuous penetration of renewable energy and power electronic equipment into modern power systems, the occurrence frequency of composite power quality disturbances has increased significantly. The accurate classification of various composite disturbances under strong noise remains a critical technical challenge. The existing single time–frequency transformation methods cannot simultaneously capture transient time-domain details and fine frequency-domain features of steady-state harmonics, while mainstream deep learning classification networks contain redundant parameters and introduce excessive computational overhead, failing to meet the real-time deployment requirements of power edge terminals. To address these limitations, a lightweight Coordinate Attention ResNet network named ResNet–LCA is proposed based on the dual-modal time–frequency fusion of the Continuous Wavelet Transform and Short-Time Fourier Transform. First, the two transforms are implemented separately to generate two groups of complementary time–frequency maps, which are concatenated along the channel dimension to fully extract the coupling features between the steady-state harmonics and the transient impulses. Second, a Haar wavelet subband mean aggregation module is designed for dimensionality reduction with negligible information loss. This module eliminates the channel redundancy introduced by the multimodal fusion and reduces the overall computational overhead at the input stage. Finally, a lightweight residual network integrated with Coordinate Attention is constructed, with Grouped Half-Convolution adopted to compress the model parameters. CA offsets the feature attenuation induced by the lightweight structural design and further improves the model’s noise immunity. A simulation verification was carried out on a simulated dataset covering 25 types of single and superimposed composite disturbances. At a signal-to-noise ratio of 20 dB, the proposed method achieved an average classification accuracy of 97.92%, with only 5.32 M total parameters and a single-sample GPU inference latency of 0.33 ms. Compared with standard ResNet-18 under 20 dB noisy conditions, the total parameter volume was reduced by 52.7%, the inference latency was shortened by 0.13 ms, and the classification accuracy was improved by 0.60 percentage points. The proposed method achieves coordinated optimization of classification accuracy, noise immunity and inference efficiency, and it can provide lightweight technical support for online intelligent power quality monitoring at the edge nodes of microgrids and islanded power systems.