Abstract: For the real-time monitoring of substation equipment, a condition monitoring system of substation equipment based on thermal cameras is designed, and a novel condition monitoring algorithm of substation equipment is proposed by using thermal images obtained from thermal cameras. Firstly, the thermal image and normal image of the equipment are collected by thermal cameras, and the maximum and minimum temperatures in the image are found by using the optical character recognition method. Secondly, the possible fault area bounded by rectangle frame is obtained by median filter and corrosion technology. Thirdly, according to the rectangular frame clipping image, the speeded-up robust feature of the clipping image is extracted. Finally, the state of substation equipment can be identified by using the trained ANFIS or SVM classifier to process the speeded-up robust features with advanced threshold value. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can correctly identify the critical fault conditions of substation equipment by using SVM, while there are some errors in the algorithm using ANFIS to identify the critical fault conditions of substation equipment.