3D Reconstruction of 138 KV Power-lines from Airborne LiDAR Data

Abstract

Due to infrequent and imprecise maintenance inspection in power-line corridors, accidents can be caused by interferences, for instance, surrounding trees. Transmission power-line inspection conventionally relies on the participation of ground personnel and airborne camera to patrol power-lines, and is limited by intensive labour, and difficult working conditions and management. Airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) has proven a powerful tool to overcome these limitations to enable more efficient inspection. Active airborne LiDAR systems directly capture the 3D information of power infrastructure and surrounding objects. This study aims at building a semi-automatic 3D reconstruction workflow for power-lines extracted from airborne LiDAR data of 138 kV transmission line corridors (500 m by 340 m) in Nanaimo, BC, Canada. The proposed workflow consists of three components: detection, extraction, and fitting. The power-lines are automatically detected with regular geometric shape using a set of algorithms, including density-based filtering, Hough transform and concatenating algorithm. The complete power-lines are then extracted using a rectangular searching technique. Finally, the 3D power-lines are reconstructed through fitting by a hyperbolic cosine function and least-squares fitting. A case study is carried out to evaluate the proposed workflow for hazard tree detection in the corridor. The results obtained demonstrate that power-lines can be reconstructed in 3D, which are useful in detection of hazard trees to support power-line corridor management.