The fusion of classifier outputs to improve partial discharge classification

The detection of partial discharge signals and classifying its patterns is an area of interest in the analysis of defects in high voltage cables. This paper investigates a filter-bank based approach to extract frequency domain based features to represent partial discharge signals. By applying the fast Fourier transform, the sampled partial discharge data are mapped into equivalent discrete frequency bins, which are then grouped into N equal sub-bands and also octave sub-bands, each providing N-dimensional features for partial discharge pattern classification. Two classifiers, namely, the support vector machine and the sparse representation classifier, are implemented and their outputs are fused, in order to improve the accuracy of classifying partial discharge. Classification accuracy is also compared with wavelet domain based octave frequency sub-band features.