Extraction of power lines from aerial images based on Hough transform

Abstract

The extraction of power lines from aerial images and the distinguishing of them are of great significance to locate the points of the faults on power lines and to diagnose the components equipped on power lines. To solve the two problems, an algorithm composed of three steps is proposed as follows. Firstly, the edges of power lines are extracted by SWIFTS algorithm1, which is developed on the basis of the differentiation of Dissimilarity between power line and background. Secondly, to detect power lines, Hough transform (HT) is employed by taking advantage of its insensitive to noise. Lastly, a clustering algorithm based on Nearest Neighborhood (NN) is adopted to distinguish power lines. Experiments and analysis demonstrate that the proposed algorithm could effectively extract and distinguish power lines from aerial images.