Detection of Bird Nests on Equipments of Electric Transmission Lines Based on Aerial Images

Abstract

This paper presents a method for detecting bird nests on the equipments of electric transmission lines by aerial images. Firstly, an input color aerial image is transformed from the RGB space to the HSV space, and then bird nests can be segmented roughly from the aerial images by the K-means clustering algorithm. After that, some noises are removed by morphological filtering operations. Finally, the location of the bird nests in aerial images can be obtained by judging the shapes of the connected regions. Experiments show that this method is effective and can be applied to the helicopter patrol inspection system.