Towards the Automatic Visual Monitoring of Electricity Pylons from Aerial Images

Visual inspection of electricity transmission and distribution networks relies on flying a helicopter around energized high voltage towers for image collection. The sensed data is taken offline and screened by skilled personnel for faults. This poses high risk to the pilot and crew and is highly expensive and inefficient. This paper reviews work targeted at detecting components of electricity transmission and distribution lines with attention to unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platforms. The potential of deep learning as the backbone of image data analysis was explored. For this, we used a new dataset of high resolution aerial images of medium-to-low voltage electricity towers. We demonstrated that reliable classification of towers is feasible using deep learning methods with very good results