Voxel-Based Extraction of Transmission Lines From Airborne LiDAR Point Cloud Data

The safety of the electricity infrastructure significantly affects both our daily life and industrial activities. Timely and accurate monitoring of the safety of electricity network can prevent dangerous situations effectively. Thus, we, in this paper, develop a voxel-based method for automatically extracting the transmission lines from airborne LiDAR point cloud data. The method proposed in this paper uses three-dimensional (3-D) voxels as primitives and consist of the following steps: First, skeleton structure extraction using Laplacian smoothing; second, feature construction of a 3-D voxel using Latent Dirichlet allocation topic model; and third Markov random field model-based extraction for generating locally continuous and globally optimal results. To evaluate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method, experiments were conducted on four different types of power line scenes with flat and complex terrains from helicopter-borne LiDAR point cloud data. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method is efficient and robust for automatically detecting both the single conductor and the bundled conductors, with precision, recall, and quality of over 96.78%, 98.67%, and 96.66%, respectively. Moreover, compared with other existing methods, our proposed method provides higher detection correctness rate.