Transmission Line Fault Diagnosis Based on Time–Frequency-Domain Recurrence Plots and CNN-BiGRU-Attention

Abstract

Rapid and accurate identification of various faults occurring in transmission lines is essential for restoring normal line operation. However, existing transmission line fault diagnosis methods still face challenges in terms of noise immunity and diagnostic accuracy. To address these issues, this paper proposes a deep learning method based on recurrence plots and a convolutional neural network–bidirectional gated recurrent unit–attention mechanism model. The voltage and current signals of transmission lines are transformed into recurrence plots in both the time and frequency domains. Parallel convolutional neural networks are then employed to extract local features from the two domains, while bidirectional gated recurrent units are used to capture temporal dependencies. Furthermore, multi-head self-attention and cross-attention mechanisms are introduced to enhance key features within each domain and achieve adaptive fusion of inter-domain feature information. A transmission line model is established in Simulink to collect data under various fault conditions and influencing factors, thereby verifying the effectiveness and adaptability of the proposed method. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves fault recognition accuracies of 99.63%, 96.68%, and 75.38% under NL1, NL2, and NL3 Gaussian-noise conditions, respectively, and maintains accuracies of 99.02%, 95.93%, and 72.43% under mixed-noise conditions. Compared with other deep learning models, the proposed method demonstrates higher diagnostic accuracy and stronger robustness.