With the continuous development of industrial intelligent inspection technology, the equipment element state recognition system based on digital image processing is widely used. In order to improve the accuracy of power distribution cabinet(PDC) equipment element state recognition in a distribution room, a ResNet(residual networks)-based equipment element state recognition method is proposed. Firstly, the data acquisition system is set up and the data set is constructed. Then, for the PDC image, the preset device component target area is cropped to generate the device component image. For device component images, a ResNet-based component state recognition model was constructed and trained, and the trained model was used to identify component states. Taking the data set for power distribution cabinet equipment element in substation distribution rooms as the research object, a network of single prediction heads is adopted as the component with complex features, and the network of multiple prediction heads is adopted as the component with simple features. Then, the compact and pruning model compression method is used to reduce the number of parameters and the calculation amount under the condition of less accuracy loss. Finally, the architecture design of the inspection system is introduced. A JetSon Nano edge terminal is used as the running hardware of the algorithm module to reduce the communication cost.