Power Line Detection Based on Subpixel-Neighborhood Attention in Complex Terrain Backgrounds

Helicopter crashes caused by collisions with power lines during low-altitude flights have been reported frequently. This article proposes a new power line detection method based on subpixel-neighborhood attention (SNA) to improve the detection performance of power lines in complex terrain backgrounds for helicopter flight safety. In complex terrain backgrounds, power line distribution tends to be sparse and power lines lack distinct features. This leads to intermittent detection results, loss of detailed information, and poor detection performance. SNA interpolates the neighborhood of neighborhood attention (NA) to refine it, obtaining high-resolution subpixel neighborhoods before conducting self-attention operations. As a result, SNA establishes connections between various pixels of power lines, producing continuous and more accurate detection results while improving the ability to extract detailed information about power lines in low-resolution images. The experiments on the transmission line aerial-image (TLA) dataset demonstrate that adding SNA to the power line detection method significantly improves the detection accuracy of power lines by 7.82%, effectively enhancing the detection performance of helicopters in identifying power lines in complex terrain backgrounds.