Reconstruction of Power Lines from Point Clouds

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method for reconstructing power line catenary curves from lidar point clouds, enabling applications like digital twin creation and vegetation encroachment assessment.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach for modeling power lines from point clouds, facilitating accurate extraction and analysis of power line features from lidar data.

Findings

Successful extraction of power line models from lidar data

Application demonstrated in vegetation encroachment assessment

Potential for improving digital twin geospatial models

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel solution for constructing line features modeling each catenary curve present within a series of points representing multiple catenary curves. The solution can be applied to extract power lines from lidar point clouds, which can then be used in downstream applications like creating digital twin geospatial models and evaluating the encroachment of vegetation. This paper offers an example of how the results obtained by the proposed solution could be used to assess vegetation growth near transmission power lines based on freely available lidar data for the City of Utrecht, Netherlands [1].