Electric Power Quality Disturbances

Classification based on Temporal-Spectral

Images & Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

M. Aymane Ahajjam, Daniel B. Licea, Mounir Ghogho, Abdellatif Kobbane

TICLab, International University of Rabat - Mohammed V University, Rabat
{aymane.aha j jam, daniel.bonilla −
licea, mounir.ghogho}@uir.ac.ma, abdellati f .kobbane@um5.ac.ma

Abstract
We propose a deep learning based technique for power quality disturbances detec-
tion and identification that aims at mimicking the reasoning of human field experts.
Experiments show that our technique is able to detect and identify with a high ac-
curacy single and combined disturbances even in the presence of noise.

1. Introduction
Electric signals monitoring and real-time identification of power quality disturbances (PQDs) (e.g., sags,
swells, transients [1]) are key features of the smart grid and are necessary for the network’s recovery.
In this day and age, PQDs’ frequency and criticality is bound to increase, especially since an electric
signal with poor quality is known to have a negative impact on the energy producers as well as on
the consumers [2, 3]. Traditionally, PQDs detection was mainly performed manually with human field
experts. Although this approach represents a viable solution, it suffers from being inefficient since human
experts cannot process data for long periods of time (due to physical exhaustion), as well as being
impractical when dealing with large scale networks [3]. On the other hand, automatic PQD detection
based on artificial intelligence techniques mitigate the above-mentioned issues [4–7]. The rest of this
paper is organized as follows: Section 2 sheds light on the FTSI and the employed dataset. Performances
of FTSI-empowered models are evaluated, and the results are discussed in Section 3. Finally, Section 4
gives a conclusion of the paper.

2. PQD detection and classification process

2.1. Fused Temporal Spectral Images
The voltage signal segment is converted into an FTSI as follows: First the raw signal is normalized
and its negative values are replaced by zeros as they carry mostly redundant information. This is the

Temporal representation
Spectral representation

Fig. 1. An FTSI example.

time-domain representation. Second, the amplitude of the normalized single-sided spectrum is calcu-
lated using the FFT and then normalized to form the frequency-domain representation. Finally, both
representations are superimposed on the same image with the temporal one is plotted using a dark grey;
the spectral one using a light grey; and the pixels where both plots intersect in black. An example of an
FTSI that we have generated using this procedure is shown in Fig. 1.

2.2. Multi-label classification

In a traditional multi-class classification approach, the classes are mutually exclusive. Yet, due to the
fact that multiple PQDs can occur simultaneously (i.e. PQDs are non-mutually exclusive), a multi-label
classification is more suitable for this problem. This approach allows input data instances to belong to
multiple categories (i.e., labels) simultaneously.

2.3. Synthetic PQD signals generation

Synthetic PQD signals were generated using the integral mathematical model implemented in MATLAB
described in [1]. This model holds a total of 29 different classes consisting of nine single classes and 20
combinations. PQD signals are generated so that each disturbance is divided into three subsets of equal
cardinality. Fig. 2 shows the corresponding FTSIs of four different synthetic PQD signals (of 20kS in
length) generated with the method described in this section.

(a) Interruption (b) Sag, Oscillatory transient

Fig. 2. Examples of [64x128]pixels FTSIs of signals with single and multiple disturbances.

3. Experimentation & Results

The classification results are presented in Table 1, where the EfficientNet-B0 model was trained and
tested on four FTSI datasets. We can see that training on noisy FTSIs provides best performance in
comparison with the rest of the datasets. Nevertheless, increasing FTSIs sizes can provide improved
performances.

Table 1. Mean classification results of the FTSI-empowered EfficientNet-B0 (Acc is in %).

Training Testing
Max. Input
Dataset type freq. size noiseless 50db 40db 30db 20db
Acc F2
Acc F2 Acc F2 Acc F2 Acc F2 Acc F2
Noiseless FTSIs 10kHz [64x128] 99.39 0.992 99.16 0.988 88.33 0.807 87.36 0.804 84.54 0.795 82.21 0.735
Noiseless FTSIs 5kHz [64x128] 98.72 0.985 88.93 0.697 88.33 0.806 84.61 0.605 82.97 0.558 80.91 0.524
Noisy FTSIs 10kHz [64x128] 98.64 0.987 98.62 0.987 98.62 0.987 98.62 0.986 98.50 0.985 97.94 0.976
Noisy FTSIs 10kHz [64x64] 97.60 0.975 97.61 0.975 97.49 0.975 97.49 0.974 97.28 0.973 95.51 0.945
Noisy Time Series - 128 89.16 0.857 77.10 0.643 77.07 0.639 76.98 0.636 76.98 0.636 76.95 0.635

4. Conclusion
In this paper, we have presented a new PQD classification technique based on 2D grey-scale images
fusing temporal and spectral representations of signals. The problem was formulated as a multi-label
classification. Simulation results proved the efficiency of this technique.
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