An Integrated Multiscale Geometric Analysis Approach for Automatic Extraction of Power Lines from High Resolution Remote Sensing Images

Abstract

High resolution remote sensing systems provide cheaper and fast way of acquiring images of power lines. However, such images depicting the details of other complex background objects, noises, and complicated brightness measurements, make separate extraction of the power lines challenging. This paper addresses the problem of automatic extraction of power lines from high resolution remote sensing images obtained from different sources. In order to automatically extract the power lines, we proposed an integrated Multiscale Geometric Analysis (MGA) approach. First, complementary Gabor and matched filters (MF) were employed over an image to suppress unnecessary background and noises, and initial discrimination of the power lines. Then, the filtering output was decomposed in to scale and orientation based subband coefficients using the Fast Discrete Curvelet Transform (FDCT) so as to access and modify different image features separately. By employing selective modification operations, well-established power line structures ready for extraction were derived. Finally the powerlines were extracted with hysteresis thresholding. The approach was successful in extracting power lines from high resolution images captured in any orientation. It is robust even when the source image is cluttered, and degraded due to noise and brightness effects. Power lines represented by weak intensities, crossing bright image regions, changing direction, closer power lines and those crossing each other, disconnected/broken power lines due to noise and occlusions were all inferred and extracted successfully. The approach was validated using real test images and the performance measures showed over 90% average accuracy fitting the ground truth.