Acta Geodaetica et Cartographica Sinica ›› 2016, Vol. 45 ›› Issue (3): 347-353.doi: 10.11947/j.AGCS.2016.20150186

Previous Articles     Next Articles

3D Power Line Reconstruction from Airborne LiDAR Point Cloud of Overhead Electric Power Transmission Corridors

LIN Xiangguo, ZHANG Jixian   

  1. Chinese Academy of Surveying and Mapping, Beijing 100830, China
  • Received:2015-04-07 Revised:2015-12-07 Online:2016-03-20 Published:2016-03-25
  • Supported by:
    The National Natural Science Foundation of China(No.41371405);Basic Surveying and Mapping Project of National Administration of Surveying, Mapping and Geoinformation(No.A1506)

Abstract: 3D power line reconstruction is one of the main tasks in power line patrols using LiDAR systems mounted on helicopters. A 3D reconstruction method is proposed to reconstruct the power lines from the airborne LiDAR point clouds of the overhead electric power transmission corridors. Firstly, the pylons' LiDAR points and the initial routine trajectory of the transmission lines are employed to derive the precise information such as the locations and number of the pylons, the real routine trajectory, and the total number of spans. Secondly, the power line corridor is divided into a number of spans, the scope of each span in the XOY plane is determined, and the powerline LiDAR points are allocated into the corresponding spans where they are located. Thirdly, the powerline points of each span are clustered by the k-means algorithm in a normalized projection space, and each cluster corresponds to one power line. Finally, each power line is reconstructed based on a combination of a line model and a parabola model. Two experiments suggest that the proposed method is capable of automatically and correctly reconstructing 3D models of the long power lines with high accuracy. Moreover, it is robust to many factors such as the changing number, types, arrangements, blunders of the power lines, the changing length of the spans, and the irregular breakage of the LiDAR point clouds.

Key words: airborne LiDAR, power line patrol, power pine, 3D reconstruction, catenary, parabola

CLC Number: