The accumulation of atmospheric and industrial pollution of high-voltage insulators is one of the frequent problems and a pattern of failures in transmission systems. In this paper, a two-phase approach based on deep learning is proposed for the detection of pollution of high-voltage insulators. The proposed approach automatically detects three types of pollution (salt, soot and excrement) based on UAV images. In addition to detection, the classification of pollution is automatically done into three levels (low, medium and high pollution). In the first phase, the You Only Look Once (YOLO) detector is used for precise detection and isolation of insulators, where an average accuracy of [email protected]... More >