Corridor Mapping Using Stereo
Vision
Powerline Inspection
Corridor mapping has a number of applications. One of these is powerline inspection. Power
companies in Australia (and many other countries) are required to maintain a regulated
clearance space around all powerlines for bushfire mitigation and safety purposes. Current
methods for checking clearances involve laborious, ground based, manual visual inspection
of distribution networks to determine which trees must be cleared, together with extensive
aerial audits of the network to ensure effective clearance of the network prior to the bushfire
season. These are expensive, time consuming and subject to observer bias or a failure to
observe trouble spots at the right time.
For several years, Powercor Australia
Ltd, the largest electricity distributor in the
Australian state of Victoria, has been interested in the possibility of developing a cost
effective airborne image capture and processing system to automatically measure the
clearance of trees from powerlines to support bushfire mitigation operations. It is envisaged
that such a system will involve an aircraft flying at approximately 80 metres above the
ground, mounted with forward looking cameras beneath the tip of each wing, that capture a
continuous series of images of the powerline infrastructure. The system will also carry
differential global positioning systems (GPS) and inertial navigation systems (INS) to
provide position and orientation data for the aircraft.
Powercor came to CSIRO scientists from the
Biotech Imaging Group of
Mathematics, Informatics and Statistics to carry out several studies to develop a cost
effective airborne image capture and processing system to automatically measure the
clearance of trees from powerlines. Using stereo vision
techniques, the CSIRO developed a software post-processing system that automatically creates three-dimensional
(3D) space from the images. Then, after extracting key features from the images (e.g.
power poles and powerlines), it measures and reports on the offset of the trees from the
powerlines.
The following are examples showing the input images and output digital surface model,
orthoimages, and 3D visualisations.
Corridor Mapping - An Opportunity
This technology has the potential to be applied in the
mapping and positioning of linear and other features such as roads,
railways, pipelines, fibre optic cables, streams and rivers, and, on a
large scale, valley systems and shorelines. It could also be used for
inventory updating , and geohazard and slope stability assessment of roads
and railways. An opportunity exists for an enterprising company to develop
a corridor mapping service for asset monitoring.
More Information
Here is a press release about this technology
A web demo on our fast matching algorithms for 3D
reconstruction is also available
C. Sun, R. Jones, H. Talbot, X. Wu, K. Cheong, R. Beare,
M.J. Buckley, and M. Berman,
Measuring the Distance of Vegetation from Powerlines Using Stereo
Vision. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing,
60(4):269-283, June 2006.
For further information contact:
Dr Mark Berman
(phone: +61 2 9325 3205) or
Dr Changming Sun (phone:
+61 2 9325 3207)
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