Extraction of urban power lines and potential hazard analysis from mobile laser scanning point clouds

ABSTRACT

The mobile laser scanning (MLS) system can quickly collect the point cloud data of power lines and power line corridors that lay along urban road. Accurate and efficient extraction of power lines from the point cloud is the basis of power line inspections and maintenance. This paper presents a complete algorithm for power line extraction, modelling, and potential hazard analysis from MLS point clouds. The algorithm first extracted candidate power line points from non-ground points based on the analysis of linear feature. The catenary model is used to model and densify power lines. Power line corridor data are identified based on the horizontal distance between the points and the power lines. The individual trees in the power line corridor are divided into three zones: clearance, buffer, and safety zone. The sample data provided by the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Working Group (ISPRS WG) III/5 was used to test the performance of the method, and the completeness and correctness were 98.06% and 99.83%, respectively. A total of 78 individual trees were detected from the power line corridor, of which 26 trees were in the buffer zone, and 23 trees were in the clearance zone. Experiment results show clearly that this proposed method can effectively extract power lines and model them. Besides, by establishing clearance and buffer zones, trees posing potential hazards to power lines can be analysed.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.