Power line recognition and tracking method for UAVs inspection

Automatic power line recognition is a challenging task for an unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) power line inspection system. In this paper we proposed a power line recognition and tracking method for sequence aerial images. First, the power lines are enhanced by a kind of double-side filters; then, the Hough transform with parallel constraint is used for power lines recognition; finally, in the sequence image, the state of power lines are estimated, and the power lines are tracked with those estimation. The tracking could reduce the computation time and made the recognition robust. Our experiments on real image data captured from UAV demonstrate our method is effective for power line recognition in sequence image.