Extracting transmission lines from airborne LIDAR data

This letter presents an algorithm to aid in the automatic monitoring of high-voltage transmission lines using airborne light detection and ranging (LIDAR) technology. LIDAR data are first automatically labeled as transmission line, vegetation, or surface. The extracted transmission line data points are then segmented into individual spans using local affine models of the data. The algorithm correctly identified 86.9% of those data points that lay on transmission lines, and extracted 72.1% of the individual transmission line spans.