Pylon line spatial correlation assisted transmission line detection

• Published in: IEEE transactions on aerospace and electronic systems Vol. 50; no. 4; pp. 2890 - 2905
• Main Authors: Zhang, Jun, Shan, Haotian, Cao, Xianbin, Yan, Pingkun, Li, Xuelong
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.10.2014; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Bayes methods; Correlation; Electric power lines; Feature extraction; Image segmentation; Poles and towers; Power transmission lines
• ISSN: 0018-9251; 1557-9603
• DOI: 10.1109/TAES.2014.120732

A transmission line is one of the most hazardous objects to low altitude flying aircraft. Due to its extremely tiny size and unsalient visual features, transmission line detection (TLD) is a well-recognized problem. In this paper, a novel TLD method is proposed with the assistance of the spatial correlation between pylon and line for TLD. First, a unidirectional spatial mapping is built up to describe the pylon line spatial correlation. Then, the proposed pylon line spatial correlation and other line features are integrated into a Bayesian framework, which is trained in advance and used to estimate the probability of one line segment belonging to a transmission line. Compared with three other line-based TLD methods, the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can obtain better detection performance with higher detection rates and much lower false alarm rates.