Abstract: Digital power line is a core part of digital grid construction and smart line security inspection. Airborne LiDAR has a unique advantage for power line reconstruction because it is capable of accurately and quickly obtaining 3-D information. We propose a new method for automatically and rapidly extracting power lines from airborne LiDAR data in the transmission corridor. Firstly, the power line points were roughly extracted based on the spatial distribution of raw point clouds, and the noise points were removed by using the improved Hough transform and RANSAC parabolic fitting method. Then, the power lines were distributed on the horizontal plane and the vertical plane. Finally, the points of power line were extracted by the model growth method, which was based on the assumption that the plane model of single power line was linear and the model on the vertical plane was parabolic. The experimental results show that the extraction accuracy of power line reaches 99.6% using the proposed method.

Key words: airborne LiDAR, power line, improved Hough transform, RANdom SAmple Consensus