Power quality recognition in noisy environment employing deep feature extraction from cross stockwell spectrum time–frequency images

Automated and accurate detection of power quality (PQ) events is important from the point of view of safety as well as maintaining the reliability of the power transmission and distribution network. However, detection of multiple PQ events in a noisy environment is challenging task. Another important issue is the choice of meaningful features that can directly influence the accuracy of PQ detection. Considering these two aforesaid facts, this paper presents a novel framework for automated classification of PQ signals in a noisy environment employing cross Stockwell Transform (XST). The XST proposed in this paper has better noise suppression capability compared to conventional Stockwell Transform. Here, XST was used to convert 1D PQ signals to 2D time–frequency (T–F) images. To improve the accuracy of PQ detection, an automated feature extraction method employing deep learning is implemented in this work. The noise free T–F images obtained using XST were fed as inputs to several pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for deep feature extraction. Transfer learning technique was implemented to reduce the computational cost. The extracted deep features were further undergone selection using one-way analysis of variance test followed by false discovery rate correction. The statistically significant deep features were subsequently fed to three benchmark machine learning classifiers for classification of PQ signals. In addition, tests were also carried out on real-life PQ signals to verify the practicability of the proposed framework. Investigations revealed that the proposed method returned mean accuracy of 99.72% and 96.45% for classification of simulated and real-life PQ signals, respectively.