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

Automatically extracts conductors and pylons from UAV LiDAR point clouds and flags places where clearance to trees or ground is insufficient. Steps are terrain filtering, pylon detection and span splitting, height-histogram extraction of conductor points, clustering, and 3D catenary fitting of each conductor. Minimum distance from the fitted catenary to nearby objects or terrain is computed piecewise, and spots below the safe threshold are flagged; tree encroachment was detected on a 220 kV line.

Key findings

• Clearance measured at decimetre-level accuracy (per abstract)
• Tree encroachment detected on a 220 kV transmission line
• Conductors modelled with a 3D catenary (horizontal line plus hyperbolic cosine)

Limitations

• Fetched copy covered only the abstract, introduction and part of the method, so reviewScope is abstract
• Validation numbers and processing speed were not in the portion read
• Specific sensor and corridor length not identified in the portion read