Power line detection based on region growing and ridge-based line detector

Automatic power line detection is one of the most important and challenging tasks for helicopter's low flight to avoid the power-line-strike accident. In this paper, we propose a novel method to detect power lines in the infrared image. Firstly, region growing is used to get the line support regions. Then a ridge-based line detector is applied to extract the accurate power lines points in the support regions followed by a linking step combined with chain codes analysis to refine the power lines. The experimental results against two state-of-the-art line detection algorithms demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm.