Automatic Clearance Anomaly Detection for Transmission Line Corridors Utilizing UAV-Borne LIDAR Data

Abstract

Transmission line corridor (i.e., Right-of-Ways (ROW)) clearance management plays a critically important role in power line risk management and is an important task of the routine power line inspection of the grid company. The clearance anomaly detection measures the distance between the power lines and the surrounding non-power-facility objects in the corridor such as trees, and buildings, to judge whether the clearance is within the safe range. To find the clearance hazards efficiently and flexibly, this study thus proposed an automatic clearance anomaly detection method utilizing LiDAR point clouds collected by unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Firstly, the terrain points were filtered out using two-step adaptive terrain filter and the pylons were detected in the non-terrain points following a feature map method. After dividing the ROW point clouds into spans based on the pylon detection results, the power line point clouds were extracted according to their geometric distribution in local span point clouds slices, and were further segmented into clusters by applying conditional Euclidean clustering with linear feature constraints. Secondly, the power line point clouds segments were iteratively fitted with 3D catenary curve model that is represented by a horizontal line and a vertical catenary curve defined by a hyperbolic cosine function, resulting in a continuous mathematical model of the discretely sampled points of the power line. Finally, a piecewise clearance calculation method which converts the point-to-catenary curve distance measurements to minimal distance calculation based on differential geometry was used to calculate the distance between the power line and the non-power-facility objects in the ROW. The clearance measurements were compared with the standard safe threshold to find the clearance anomalies in the ROWs. Multiple LiDAR point clouds datasets collected by a large-scale UAV power line inspection system were used to validate the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed method. The detected results were validated through qualitatively visual inspection, quantitatively manual measurements in raw point clouds and on-site field survey. The experiments show that the automatic clearance anomaly detection method proposed in this paper effectively detects the clearance hazards such as tree encroachment, and the clearance measurement accuracy is decimeter level for the LiDAR point clouds collected by our UAV inspection system.

An Incongruence-Based Anomaly Detection Strategy for Analyzing Water Pollution in Images from Remote Sensing

“…Table 3 shows how the cropping was done for each Landsat 8 scene. In order to quantitatively validate the proposed strategy, we used the metrics accuracy, precision, recall [15], and F-measure [82] for which, TP are true positives, i.e., images in which incongruences are truly detected; TN are true negatives, i.e., images in which congruences are truly detected; FN are false negatives, i.e., images in which congruences are falsely detected; FP are false positives, i.e., images in which incongruences are falsely detected. Accuracy measures the efficiency of results and is represented by Equation (23), for which M is the number of images.…”

“…Ours~99.78%~73.96% 100.00% 85.04% [98] 99.59% ------------ [81] 99.20% 91.85% 53.55% 67.66% [99] 99.14% ------------ [76] 98.49% 83.84% 83.66% 83.76% [80] 98.00% ------------ [ Our strategy achieved the highest value of F-measure among the presented studies, except for [25] and [82]. However, [25] and [82] are very specific case studies.…”

“…Ours~99.78%~73.96% 100.00% 85.04% [98] 99.59% ------------ [81] 99.20% 91.85% 53.55% 67.66% [99] 99.14% ------------ [76] 98.49% 83.84% 83.66% 83.76% [80] 98.00% ------------ [ Our strategy achieved the highest value of F-measure among the presented studies, except for [25] and [82]. However, [25] and [82] are very specific case studies. Whereas in this paper and in [66,[76][77][78][80][81][82][98][99][100] the areas of study are heterogeneous, in [25], results were presented only related to an ice shelf in the Antarctic region, which is a homogeneous area of study.…”

“…Most current research focuses on outlier detection, such as [1,14,[19][20][21][22][23][24][25]44,[51][52][53][54]66,[76][77][78][80][81][82], however we discuss below only those research which are more relevant to this article. An outlier-based change detection method to detect abnormal points in multi-scale time-series images from remote sensing was proposed by Yin Shoujing et al in [76].…”

“…An automatic clearance anomaly detection method was proposed by Chen et al in [82]. The clearance anomaly detection measures the distance between power lines and other objects (e.g., trees and buildings) to evaluate whether the clearance is within the safe range.…”