# Real-Time Detection and Tracking of Foreign Object Intrusions in Power Systems via Feature-Based Edge Intelligence

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13396 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13396/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [Efficient and robust approximate nearest neighbor search using Hierarchical Navigable Small World graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09320/) (2016)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models Advance Medical Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05224/) (2021)
- [RTMDet: An Empirical Study of Designing Real-Time Object Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07784/) (2022)
- [The Application of Two-level Attention Models in Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Fine-grained Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.6447/) (2014)
- [A Ranking-based, Balanced Loss Function Unifying Classification and Localisation in Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13592/) (2020)
- [Finding Differences Between Transformers and ConvNets Using Counterfactual Simulation Testing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16499/) (2022)
- [Foreign-Object Detection in High-Voltage Transmission Line Based on Improved YOLOv8m](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07175/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a novel three-stage framework for real-time foreign object intrusion (FOI) detection and tracking in power transmission systems. The framework integrates: (1) a YOLOv7 segmentation model for fast and robust object localization, (2) a ConvNeXt-based feature extractor trained with triplet loss to generate discriminative embeddings, and (3) a feature-assisted IoU tracker that ensures resilient multi-object tracking under occlusion and motion. To enable scalable field deployment, the pipeline is optimized for deployment on low-cost edge hardware using mixed-precision inference. The system supports incremental updates by adding embeddings from previously unseen objects into a reference database without requiring model retraining. Extensive experiments on real-world surveillance and drone video datasets demonstrate the framework's high accuracy and robustness across diverse FOI scenarios. In addition, hardware benchmarks on NVIDIA Jetson devices confirm the framework's practicality and scalability for real-world edge applications.