A cascaded method for transmission tower number recognition in large scenes

Abstract

Recognizing the transmission tower numbers is an import part of the automatic inspection of high-voltage transmission lines. However, it's infeasible to accomplish this task effectively in one step giving the large scene images shot by unmanned aerial vehicles. In this paper, we present a cascaded framework consists of two CNN components: number plate detection and serial number recognition. The proposed method reduces the difficulty of localizing number characters in large scenes by leveraging the robust background, number plates. On the one hand, the proposed cascaded coarse-to-fine method reduces the missing rate and improves the detection accuracy, on the other hand, the recognition complexity is greatly reduced. The experimental results on our collected dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.