A new deep learning architecture for detection of long linear infrastructure

The use of drones in infrastructure monitoring aims at decreasing the human effort and in achieving consistency. Accurate aerial image analysis is the key block to achieve the same. Reliable detection and integrity checking of power line conductors in a diverse background are the most challenging in drone based automatic infrastructure monitoring. Most techniques in literature use first principle approach that tries to represent the image as features of interest. This paper proposes a machine learning approach for power line detection. A new deep learning architecture is proposed with very good results and is compared with GoogleNet pre-trained model. The proposed architecture uses Histogram of Gradient features as the input instead of the image itself to ensure capture of accurate line features. The system is tested on aerial image collected using drone. A healthy F-score of 84.6% is obtained using the proposed architecture as against 81% using GoogleNet model.