Conventional detection methods for the combination of power lines and power towers

With the development of technology, compared with traditional helicopter power inspection, drones have the advantages of low cost and easy operation, and more and more companies are using drones for power inspection. For UAV power inspection, how to correctly identify power lines has become an inescapable problem. The existing methods mostly identify the power lines individually, and do not focus on the power towers. In this essay, we suggest a combined power line and power tower detection method for the scenario of UAVs from take-off to flying to power lines. Firstly, the power towers are detected. Due to the a priori knowledge, the power lines must be within the range of the power towers, and confirming the range of the power towers can help us filter most of the irrelevant noises. Then the LSD line detection is performed on the canny edge map after masking the noise. Finally, the detection results are filtered and merged to obtain the power lines. In our experimental dataset, the detection accuracy is better than the direct line detection using Canny edge detection.