Classifier-Free Extraction of Power Line Wires from Point Cloud Data

This paper proposes a classifier-free method for extraction of power line wires from aerial point cloud data. It combines the advantages of both grid- and point-based processing of the input data. In addition to the non-ground point cloud data, the input to the proposed method includes the pylon locations, which are automatically extracted by a previous method. The proposed method first counts the number of wires in a span between the two successive pylons using two masks: vertical and horizontal. Then, the initial wire segments are obtained and refined iteratively. Finally, the initial segments are extended on both ends and each individual wire points are modelled as a 3D polynomial curve. Experimental results show both the object-based completeness and correctness are 97%, while the point-based completeness and correctness are 99% and 88%, respectively.