Fully Automatic Point Cloud Analysis for Powerline Corridor Mapping

Powerline inspection is an important task for electric power management. Corridor mapping, i.e., the task of surveying the surroundings of the line and detecting potentially hazardous vegetation and objects, is performed by aerial light detection and ranging (LiDAR) survey. To this purpose, the main tasks are automatic extraction of the wires and measurement of the distance of objects close to the line. In this article, we present a new fully automated solution, which does not use time-consuming line fitting method, but is based on simple geometrical assumptions and relies on the fact that wire points are isolated, sparse and widely separated from all other points in the data set. In particular, we detect and classify pylons by local-maxima strategy. Then, a new reference system, having its origin on the first pylon and y-axis toward the second one, is defined. In this new reference system, transverse sections of the raw point cloud are extracted; by iterating such procedure for all detected pylons, we are able to detect the wire bundle. Obstacles are then automatically detected according to corridor mapping requirements. The algorithm is tested on two relevant data sets.