Power Lines Extraction from Aerial Images
Guoqing Zhou · 2020
There has been little investigation of automatic extraction of power lines from aerial images due to the fact of the low resolution of aerial images in the past decades. With increasing aerial photogrammetric technology and sensor technology, it is possible for photogrammetrists to monitor the status of power lines. This paper analyzes the properties of power lines imaging, and presents an algorithm to automatically extract the power line from aerial images acquired by a digital camera onboard helicopter. This algorithm first uses the Radon transform to extract line segments of the power line, and uses the grouping method to link each segment, before finally applying the Kalman filter technology to connect the segments into an entire line. We compare our algorithm with the line mask detector method and the ratio line detector, and evaluate their performances. The experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm can successfully extract the power lines from aerial images with a very complex background. This presented method has successfully been applied for power line surveillance, three-dimensional reconstruction, and modelling on the basis of the aerial images.