Reconstruction of Power Lines from Point Clouds
This work addresses a domain-specific problem for geospatial modeling and infrastructure monitoring, but it appears incremental as it applies a novel method to a known bottleneck in power line extraction.
The paper tackles the problem of reconstructing power lines from lidar point clouds by modeling catenary curves, enabling applications such as assessing vegetation encroachment near transmission lines in Utrecht, Netherlands using freely available data.
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].