In view of the specular reflection of the protection panel and cabinet door, the accuracy of identifying the protection plate state through image is low. A state identification method of substation protection platen based on improved sparse representation is proposed. On the basis of eliminating high light interference, the platen state identification is realized. Aiming at the problem of highlight interference, firstly, the two-dimensional maximum interclass variance method is used to detect the highlight region in the image, and then the sparse representation repair algorithm is improved to eliminate the highlight interference in the image. For the repaired image, the state of the protective pressing plate is identified according to the minimum circumscribed rectangle method. Finally, the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed method are verified by two groups of comparative simulation analysis with or without highlight interference. Among them, for 200 different types of platen samples without high light interference, the accuracy of the minimum external rectangle method is 98.0%, which is better than 83.5% of the inclination identification method. For 240 image samples with high light interference, the improved sparse representation algorithm is used for state identification, and the accuracy can reach 97.92%.