Shiji Zhang

To address the challenges of low detection accuracy and high missed detection rates in insulating oil leakage detection for power equipment—arising from small and densely distributed oil stains, structural occlusion, and complex background interference—this paper proposes a detection method based on an enhanced YOLOv11s (You Only Look Once version 11 small) architecture. First, a dedicated dataset is constructed, encompassing four representative scenarios—small object detection, complex background, multi-object detection and equipment occlusion—to evaluate detection performance. Second, in terms of network design, a proposed attention module, SimAMWS (Simple Attention Module With Slicing), is introduced. This module enhances the model’s sensitivity to subtle and irregular oil stains by utilizing slicing operations and localized energy-based weighting. For bounding box regression, a U-IoU (Unified Intersection over Union) loss is adopted, which incorporates a dynamic scaling mechanism during training to enable the model to focus more effectively on high-quality candidate boxes—leading to improved localization accuracy, particularly suited to the characteristics of oil leakage. Finally, comparative experiments are conducted against mainstream object detectors including SSD (Single Shot MultiBox Detector), Faster R-CNN (Region-based Convolutional Neural Network), YOLOv5s, YOLOv8s, and the baseline YOLOv11s. The proposed method achieves an mAP@0.5 (mean Average Precision at IoU = 0.5) of 97.7% and an mAP@0.5:0.95 of 66.9%, with an inference speed of 96.4 FPS. These results demonstrate that the proposed model delivers higher detection accuracy while maintaining high inference efficiency, making it well-suited for real-time oil leak detection in power equipment and supporting the development of intelligent operation and maintenance systems in the power industry.