Abstract: Infrared thermal image processing is an effective method for detecting defects in electrical equipment. Aiming at the problem of electrical equipment segmentation in infrared thermal images with a complex background, in this study we propose a deep residual UNet network for infrared thermal image segmentation. Using a deep residual network to replace VGG16 to perform feature extraction and coding for the UNet network, a deep residual series UNET network was constructed to segment electrical equipment. To validate the effectiveness of the Res-UNet network, infrared images, including current transformers and circuit breakers, were used to test the segmentation results and were compared with the traditional UNet and Deeplabv3+ networks. The networks were tested using 876 images. The experimental results show that RES18-UNET can accurately segment electrical equipment; the segmentation precision of current transformers and circuit breakers is greater than 93%, and the mean intersection over union (MIoU) is greater than 89%. Our method obtains more accurate segmentation results than UNet and Deeplabv3+, setting the basis for intelligent diagnosis of electrical faults.