Abstract
The inspection of power lines is the crucial task for the safe operation of power transmission: its components require regular checking to detect damages and faults that are caused by corrosion or any other environmental agents and mechanical stress. During recent years, the use of Unmanned Autonomous Vehicle (UAV) for environmental and industrial monitoring is constantly growing and the demand for fast and robust algorithms for the analysis of the data acquired by drones during the inspections has increased. In this work, we use UAV to acquire power transmission lines data and apply image processing to highlight expected faults. Our method is based on a fusion algorithm for the infrared and visible power lines images, which is invariant to large scale changes and illumination changes in the real operating environment. Hence, different algorithms from image processing are applied to visible and infrared thermal data, to track the power lines and to detect faults and anomalies. The method significantly identifies edges and hot spots from the set of frames with good accuracy. At the final stage we identify hot spots using thermal images. The paper concludes with the description of the current work, which has been carried out in a research project, namely SCIADRO.
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Bushra Jalil was born in Islamabad, Pakistan in 1982. She was graduated in 2003 from National University of Science and Technology (NUST), Pakistan. She has done her PhD at the Le2i Laboratory of Universite de Bourgogne, Le Creusot France. She had worked on nonlinear signals during her PhD. Currently she is working as a postdoctoral fellow in Signals and Images Laboratory (SI), at the Institute of Information Science and Technologies, CNR, Pisa, Italy.
Maria Antonietta Pascali M.Sc. in Mathematics honors degree from the University of Pisa in 2005, PhD in Mathematics at the University of Rome La Sapienza in 2010. She is a researcher at the Institute of Information Science and Technologies of the Italian National Research Council, in Pisa. Her main interests include computational topology, image processing and virtual environment. At present she is involved in a number of research projects concerning scene understanding and structural health monitoring.
Giuseppe Riccardo Leone received his master degree in Computer Science from “La Sapienza–University of Rome” in 2002. He got the PhD in Computer Science and Automation from the University of Florence. He is with the National Research Council of Italy since 2003 working with mobile robots, multiple vision systems and virtual avatars for human computer interaction, contributing to several research projects. His main area of expertize is computer vision with particular application in mobile robotics, information fusion from multiple vision system, image analysis and understanding, smart surveillance and monitoring.
Massimo Martinelli is in the permanent staff of the CNR (since 1997) at ISTI (scientific collaborator since 1989). His main scientific interests are focused on decision support systems, deep learning and on Semantic Web technologies. He collaborates with the “Signals and Images” research laboratory at CNR-ISTI where he is responsible for the Software Technologies and Framework Area. He has been member of the W3C Multimedia Semantics Incubator Group and collaborated with the W3C Italian Office (2003–2014). Coauthor of more than 70 scientific articles, he has been involved in a number of European research projects.
Davide Moroni M.Sc. in Mathematics honors degree from the University of Pisa in 2001, dipl. at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa in 2002, PhD in Mathematics at the University of Rome La Sapienza in 2006, is a researcher at the Institute of Information Science and Technologies of the National Research Council of Italy, in Pisa. His main interests include geometric modeling, computational topology, image processing and medical imaging. At present he is involved in a number of European research projects working in discrete geometry and scene analysis. He is co-author of more than 60 scientific papers. Also, he heads the ISTI Signals and Images Laboratory.
Ovidio Salvetti Director of Research at CNR ISTI, is working in the fields of image analysis and understanding, multimedia information systems, spatial modeling and intelligent processes in computer vision and information technology. He is co-author of seven books and monographs and more than four hundred technical and scientific articles and also owner of eleven patents regarding systems and software tools for real-time signal and image acquisition and processing. He has been scientific coordinator of several National and European research and industrial Projects, in collaboration with Italian and foreign research groups, in the fields of computer vision, multimedia semantics and high-performance computing for diagnostic imaging. Member of the Editorial Boards of the International Journals Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis and Forensic Computer Science, Associate Editor of IET Image Processing, of IEEE and of the Steering Committee of a number of EU Projects.
Andrea Berton is in the staff of the Institute of Clinical Physiology of the National Research Council of Italy (Pisa) since 2007. His main scientific interests are focused on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technologies and their applications. He collaborates with many institutes of CNR, concerning UAV design and usage. In particular, he obtained the qualifications as pilot, instructor (FI) and examiner (FE) for UAVs with a take-off weight of less than 25 kg. He is the CNR reference person for the technical administrative management of the fleet. Coauthor of several scientific articles, Andrea has been involved in different scientific topics such as: agriculture, air quality, industrial, telecommunication, automation, and cultural heritage.
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Jalil, B., Pascali, M.A., Leone, G.R. et al. Visible and Infrared Imaging Based Inspection of Power Installation. Pattern Recognit. Image Anal. 29, 35–41 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1134/S1054661819010140
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1134/S1054661819010140