Title
Fully Automatic Point Cloud Analysis for Powerline Corridor Mapping
Abstract
Powerline inspection is an important task for electric power management. Corridor mapping, i.e., the task of surveying the surroundings of the line and detecting potentially hazardous vegetation and objects, is performed by aerial light detection and ranging (LiDAR) survey. To this purpose, the main tasks are automatic extraction of the wires and measurement of the distance of objects close to the line. In this article, we present a new fully automated solution, which does not use time-consuming line fitting method, but is based on simple geometrical assumptions and relies on the fact that wire points are isolated, sparse and widely separated from all other points in the data set. In particular, we detect and classify pylons by local-maxima strategy. Then, a new reference system, having its origin on the first pylon and y-axis toward the second one, is defined. In this new reference system, transverse sections of the raw point cloud are extracted; by iterating such procedure for all detected pylons, we are able to detect the wire bundle. Obstacles are then automatically detected according to corridor mapping requirements. The algorithm is tested on two relevant data sets.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1109/TGRS.2020.2989470
IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Data analysis,geospatial analysis,laser applications,maintenance engineering,power distribution lines,remote sensing,unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)
Journal
58
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
12
0196-2892
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Carla Nardinocchi1344.16
Marco Balsi2358.17
Salvatore Esposito310.77