Measuring height of high-voltage transmission poles using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery

Aerial imagery is important in remote sensing applications. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has a wide range of applications in remote sensing and presents a substantial cost-effective solution when monitoring objects on the earth’s surface. Moreover, object detection and classification are important aspects of global information system, especially for remote sensing applications and power line monitoring, which are essential for the proper distribution of electricity to consumers. Manual inspection consumes much time and involves risk, especially in remote areas that host dangerous wildlife; hence, UAV-based approaches are more feasible for such monitoring. The authors propose an UAV approach that utilises a digital surface model and incorporates a stereo matching algorithm based on UAV stereo images. The proposed algorithm was based on a graph-cut (GC) algorithm that measured the disparity map. Results were compared with well-known algorithms; including, for example, global and local stereo matching algorithms. The proposed solution introduces and integrates ordering constraints along with a submodular energy minimisation function to/with the GC algorithm to enhance performance. The authors measured sensitivity and recall for all parameters against ground truth data for differently cropped images of 16 power poles. Results showed that the proposed model performed more accurately compared to extant methods. © 2017 The Royal Photographic Society.