SE-Attention Augmented Hybrid CNN–BiLSTM Model for Leakage Current-Based Detection of Cracked and Broken High-Voltage Porcelain Insulators

Extreme and sudden temperature fluctuations observed as a result of global climate change increase the environmental pressure on energy transmission infrastructure. These meteorological changes significantly increase the risk of failure for porcelain insulators, which exhibit low thermal resistance and are susceptible to sudden arcing and surface deformations. In this study, a hybrid CNN–BiLSTM–SE architecture augmented with the Squeeze-and-Excitation attention mechanism is proposed using surface leakage current signals to diagnose healthy, cracked, and broken structural conditions in three-unit porcelain insulators. The SE block in the architecture dynamically rescales feature maps from CNN layers on a channel-by-channel basis. Thus, it highlights the signal characteristic that is dominant for fault diagnosis just before the BiLSTM units learn temporal dependencies. Leakage current data were obtained under an experimental setup at 60 kV for 15 different conditions covering all possible combinations of healthy, cracked, and broken insulator units. The raw signals were preprocessed with the Savitzky–Golay filter to suppress noise while preserving the diagnostic waveform morphology. 24 features covering time-domain statistics, frequency-domain spectral characteristics, and wavelet-domain energy components were extracted and used as model inputs. The CNN–BiLSTM–SE architecture achieved a classification accuracy of 93.83%, surpassing the standalone CNN (88.89%), BiLSTM (87.65%), and CNN–BiLSTM (91.36%) models, as well as classical machine-learning baselines (SVM: 87.65%, Random Forest: 90.12%, Boosted Trees: 87.65%).