Power distribution grids are typically installed outdoors and are exposed to environmental conditions. When contamination accumulates in the structures of the network, there may be shutdowns caused by electrical arcs. To improve the reliability of the network, visual inspections of the electrical power system can be carried out; these inspections can be automated using computer vision techniques based on deep neural networks. Based on this need, this paper proposes the Semi-ProtoPNet deep learning model to classify defective structures in the power distribution networks. The Semi-ProtoPNet deep neural network does not perform convex optimization of its last dense layer to maintain the impact of the negative reasoning process on image classification. The negative reasoning process rejects the incorrect classes of an input image; for this reason, it is possible to carry out an analysis with a low number of images that have different backgrounds, which is one of the challenges of this type of analysis. Semi-ProtoPNet achieves an accuracy of 97.22%, being superior to VGG-13, VGG-16, VGG-19, ResNet-34, ResNet-50, ResNet-152, DenseNet-121, DenseNet-161, DenseNet-201, and also models of the same class such as ProtoPNet, NP-ProtoPNet, Gen-ProtoPNet, and Ps-ProtoPNet.
