Visual inspection of power lines by U.A.S.

Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) can be used nowadays for automatic visual inspection of power lines. Two challenging problems need to be solved: The detection of the power lines and the tracking of the lines. This paper presents a method for vision systems to extract power lines from cluttered natural backgrounds e.g. trees, cloudy skies. By means of range filters, some morphological operations, Canny operator and Hough transformation this separation is carried out, which results in binary images containing the detected lines only. These images can be further processed for inspection of power lines and pylons.