Automatic extraction of insulators from 3D LiDAR data of an electrical substation

Abstract. A considerable percentage of power outages are caused by animals that come into contact with conductive elements of electrical substations. These can be prevented by insulating conductive electrical objects, for which a 3D as-built plan of the substation is crucial. This research aims to create such a 3D as-built plan using terrestrial LiDAR data while in this paper the aim is to extract insulators, which are key objects in electrical substations. This paper proposes a segmentation method based on a new approach of finding the principle direction of points’ distribution. This is done by forming and analysing the distribution matrix whose elements are the range of points in 9 different directions in 3D space. Comparison of the computational performance of our method with PCA (principal component analysis) shows that our approach is 25% faster since it utilizes zero-order moments while PCA computes the first- and second-order moments, which is more time-consuming. A knowledge-based approach has been developed to automatically recognize points on insulators. The method utilizes known insulator properties such as diameter and the number and the spacing of their rings. The results achieved indicate that 24 out of 27 insulators could be recognized while the 3 un-recognized ones were highly occluded. Check point analysis was performed by manually cropping all points on insulators. The results of check point analysis show that the accuracy, precision and recall of insulator recognition are 98%, 86% and 81%, respectively. It is concluded that automatic object extraction from electrical substations using only LiDAR data is not only possible but also promising. Moreover, our developed approach to determine the directional distribution of points is computationally more efficient for segmentation of objects in electrical substations compared to PCA. Finally our knowledge-based method is promising to recognize points on electrical objects as it was successfully applied for insulators.