An Effective Power Line Distance Measuring Method Based on UAV Image Sequence

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) based power line distance measuring methods have been spotlighted in recent years. Considering the cost of equipping a high-precision POS system and the difficulty of measuring ground control points, we proposed an effective power-line distance measuring method based on UAV image sequence by utilizing the characteristic of power lines tower. Firstly, we use the control points and corresponding image points extracted from power lines tower to calibrate the camera, Secondly, we seek to calculate the spatial coordinates of undetermined points on the power line by space intersection, then the elevation information of power lines is calculated by quadratic curve fitting, Finally, the distance between power lines and surrounding ground is obtained using the DEM data of experimental area. Results of synthetic experiment demonstrate that the proposed method is feasible and effective.