Title
A Hierarchical unsupervised method for power line classification from airborne LiDAR data
Abstract
The automatic classification of power lines from airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data is a crucial task for power supply management. The methods for power line classification can be either supervised or unsupervised. Supervised methods might achieve high accuracy for small areas, but it is time consuming to collect training data over areas of different conditions and complexity. Therefore, unsupervised methods that can automatically work over different areas without sophisticated parameter tuning are in great demand. In this paper, we presented a hierarchical unsupervised LiDAR-based power line classification method that first screened the power line candidate points (including the power line corridor direction detection based on a layered Hough transform, connectivity analysis, and Douglas-Peucker simplification algorithm), followed by the extraction of contextual linear and angular features for each candidate laser points, and finally by setting the feature threshold values to identify the power line points. We tested the method over both forest and urban areas and found that the precision, recall and quality rates were up to 96.7%, 88.8% and 78.3%, respectively, for the test datasets and were higher than the ones from a previously developed supervised classification method. Overall, our approach has the advantages of achieving relatively high accuracy and being relatively fast.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1080/17538947.2018.1503740
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DIGITAL EARTH
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Airborne LiDAR data,power lines,unsupervised classification,feature extraction
Journal
12.0
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
12.0
1753-8947
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
10
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yanjun Wang1102.27
Qi Chen211.47
Lin Liu315026.85
Lin Liu400.34
Kai Li55823.25