Visual inspection of power lines by U.A.S.

Author

Gerke, Michael ; Seibold, Peter

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. Eng., FernUniv. in Hagen, Hagen, Germany

fYear

2014

fDate

16-18 Oct. 2014

Firstpage

1077

Lastpage

1082

Abstract

Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) can be used nowadays for automatic visual inspection of power lines. Two challenging problems need to be solved: The detection of the power lines and the tracking of the lines. This paper presents a method for vision systems to extract power lines from cluttered natural backgrounds e.g. trees, cloudy skies. By means of range filters, some morphological operations, Canny operator and Hough transformation this separation is carried out, which results in binary images containing the detected lines only. These images can be further processed for inspection of power lines and pylons.

Keywords

automatic optical inspection; autonomous aerial vehicles; computer vision; electrical maintenance; electrical safety; feature extraction; filters; optical tracking; power cables; power engineering computing; power overhead lines; Canny operator; Hough transformation; automatic visual inspection; cluttered natural background; morphological operations; power lines tracking; range filter; unmanned aerial system; vision systems; Image color analysis; Image edge detection; Inspection; Matched filters; Morphological operations; Transforms; Visualization; Image processing; Power Line detection and inspection; Unmanned aerial Systems;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Electrical and Power Engineering (EPE), 2014 International Conference and Exposition on

Conference_Location

Iasi

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICEPE.2014.6970074

Filename

6970074