Reconstructing Power Lines from Images

Abstract

Abstract We present a novel method for 3D reconstruction of overhead power lines from a few images. The solution to this problem has a deep impact over the strategies adopted to monitor the many thousand kilometres of powerlines innervating our countries;currently, the only effective solution is based on the use of high-end laser scanners mounted on drones. The difficulty with image-based 3D reconstruction algorithms is that images of wires of the power lines typically do not have point features to match among different images. We leverage on a few assumptions that can be made on the power lines case and define an ad-hoc strategy for solving the problem. We first use a Structure from Motion algorithm to retrieve the approximate camera poses and then formulate a minimization problem to simultaneously define a 3D wire hypothesis and refine the camera poses so that the projections of that wire are consistent on the supporting images.

Fabio Ganovelli
Fabio Ganovelli
Senior Researcher

Senior Researcher at the Visual Computing Lab

Luigi Malomo
Luigi Malomo
Researcher

Computational Fabrication