An automated method for power line points detection from terrestrial liDAR data

Abstract

Monitoring and maintenance of power lines are very essential because they are the elementary component of the power sector and play significant roles in various areas including electric network upgradation, designing, and the analysis of electricity by optimizing the routes. Mapping of power lines is an easier task with the help of laser scanner compared to traditional techniques because the power lines are located above the ground in particular to higher and lower voltage power line networks. Detection of power lines in densely situated cities in urban areas is a tedious task. Typically, in such complex environment, power lines are positioned as parallel to the rooftops of buildings. In the present study, an automated approach for the detection of power line points has been proposed using terrestrial LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) point cloud dataset. The proposed method includes four basic steps namely vertical slicing, neighborhood analysis, distance-based clustering, and analysis of′individual clusters. The proposed method has been tested at a terrestrial LiDAR dataset. The completeness and correctness of proposed method are 98.54% and 96.89%, respectively.