Extraction of Forest Power lines From LiDAR point cloud Data

Abstract

This paper presents a hierarchical method for high voltage power lines extraction and reconstruction. To begin, the potential power lines points are differentiated from the pylons and other plants using visual-based characteristics, i.e., power lines are non-vertical objects since they dangle above the ground and have space between them, while vegetation and pylons are vertical objects. The power line points are further refined from noise and surrounding vegetation points using the Hough transform. The pylons are detected from vertical points using their shape and area properties and used to obtain the power lines in the form of span points at their locations. For bundles extraction, the span points are divided into several segments and binary mask is produced from each segment. Each binary mask is utilised to link up the bundle segments using image-based techniques and to rebuild the broken/missing section of power lines. Finally, power lines are modelled in 3D polynomial curve models. The proposed method is tested on different spans from three different datasets and object-based evaluation of the proposed technique yields promising results.