Characterization and modeling of power line corridor elements from LiDAR point clouds

Abstract As the electric companies need to assure the reliability of their services, power line management gains importance during the last years. Many of them rely on LiDAR scanning of their assets to obtain the status of their power line corridors and determine possible risks. In this paper, a novel sevenfold staged pipeline is introduced to classify pylon and wire points and model the conductors. Wire points are subdivided into three categories: shield, common conductor and chain. Pylons of two different types are taken into account: suspension and anchor. For the first case, insulator strains are also identified and separated. Wire points are segmented as individual conductors and a 3D-wise model based on the catenary equation is generated for each conductor using particle swarm optimization. Tests have been conducted on a set with 25 point cloud files to assess the accuracy and correctness of the results given by the proposed pipeline.