Enhanced Automatic Span Segmentation of Airborne LiDAR Powerline Point Clouds: Mitigating Adjacent Powerline Interference

Extracting powerline point clouds from airborne LiDAR data and conducting 3D reconstruction has become a critical technical support for automatic transmission corridor inspection. To enhance data processing efficiency, this paper proposes an automatic method for span segmentation of powerline point clouds that accounts for adjacent powerline interference, aiming to provide “clean” data for the automatic reconstruction of powerline catenary curve models of each span. This method tackles a key challenge in airborne LiDAR data: interference from adjacent or cross-over powerlines when automatically extracting main-line pylon positions and powerline points. Leveraging the spatial relationship between pylons and powerlines in LiDAR point clouds, we developed a fast density clustering algorithm based on a novel point-counting grid (PCGrid), which greatly accelerates DBSCAN clustering while adaptively extracting main-line pylons and powerline point clouds. The method proceeds in three steps: first, using 2D density clustering to extract reliable pylon positions and 3D density clustering to filter out non-main-line point clouds; second, verifying pylon connection combinations via main-line point clouds and identifying the longest line in the connection matrix as the pylons of the main powerline; and third, assigning powerline points to their corresponding spans for segmented reconstruction. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed PCGrid structure not only significantly improves clustering efficiency, but also enables a fully automated span segmentation process that effectively suppresses adjacent powerline interference, highlighting the novelty of integrating efficient PCGrid-based clustering with spatial-relationship-driven pylon verification into a unified framework for reliable 3D powerline reconstruction.