Study on Power Tower Extraction and Fast Positioning from Airborne LiDAR Data

Airborne LiDAR has become an important technique for transmission line digitalization，reconstruction and safety inspection.Moreover，accurately and efficiently extracting the position of each tower from massive point clouds is basic and important task for the applications in power industry.In this study，a method was proposed to efficiently extract the point clouds and fast determine the position of power towers using airborne LiDAR data.Firstly，the point clouds of power towers were automatically separated from raw data based on the spatial distribution characteristics of airborne LiDAR data.Secondly，each power tower was efficiently detected using a region\|growing algorithm.Finally，a least square linear fitting method was used to determine the accurate position of each power tower.The new proposed method was applied to several LiDAR data sets in areas with high voltage transmission lines.Results indicated that the integrity of the power towers’ points is up to 91.1%，and the accuracy of center positions is high enough with the medium error of 13.5 cm.Additionally，our study also concluded that the proposed method is robust and applicable even the point density is relatively low.