ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences
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Articles | Volume IV-2/W4
https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-annals-IV-2-W4-165-2017
https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-annals-IV-2-W4-165-2017
13 Sep 2017
 | 13 Sep 2017

AIRBORNE LIDAR POWER LINE CLASSIFICATION BASED ON SPATIAL TOPOLOGICAL STRUCTURE CHARACTERISTICS

Y. Wang, Q. Chen, K. Li, D. Zheng, and J. Fang

Keywords: Airborne lidar, urban power line, neighbourhood selection, spatial topological feature, structure characteristics, power line classification

Abstract. Automatic extraction of power lines has become a topic of great importance in airborne LiDAR data processing for transmission line management. In this paper, we present a new, fully automated and versatile framework that consists of four steps: (i) power line candidate point filtering, (ii) neighbourhood selection, (iii) feature extraction based on spatial topology, and (iv) SVM classification. In a detailed evaluation involving seven neighbourhood definitions, 26 geometric features and two datasets, we demonstrated that the use of multi-scale neighbourhoods for individual 3D points significantly improved the power line classification. Additionally, we showed that the spatial topological features may even further improve the results while reducing data processing time.