EXPERIMENTS WITH UAS IMAGERY FOR AUTOMATIC MODELING OF POWER LINE 3D GEOMETRY

Abstract. The ideal mapping technology for transmission line inspection is the airborne LiDAR executed from helicopter platforms. It allows for full 3D geometry extraction in highly automated manner. Large scale aerial images can be also used for this purpose, however, automation is possible only for finding transmission line positions (2D geometry), and the sag needs to be estimated manually. For longer lines, these techniques are less expensive than ground surveys, yet they are still expensive. UAS technology has the potential to reduce these costs, especially if using inexpensive platforms with consumer grade cameras. This study investigates the potential of using high resolution UAS imagery for automatic modeling of transmission line 3D geometry.

The key point of this experiment was to employ dense matching algorithms to appropriately acquired UAS images to have points created also on wires. This allowed to model the 3D geometry of transmission lines similarly to LiDAR acquired point clouds. Results showed that the transmission line modeling is possible with a high internal accuracy for both, horizontal and vertical directions, even when wires were represented by a partial (sparse) point cloud.