Introduction  Since the power line has the characteristics of long transmission distance and a complex spatial environment, the UAV LiDAR point cloud technology can completely and efficiently obtain the geometric information of the power line and its surrounding spatial objects, and the existing supervised extraction and unsupervised extraction methods are deficient in point cloud data extraction in a large range of complex environments, according to the spatial environment characteristics of the main network and distribution network line point cloud data, a rapid extraction method of point cloud power line is proposed based on projection line characteristics and region growing algorithm.

  Method  Firstly, in view of the characteristics that the overhead lines of the main network were usually higher than the surrounding spatial objects, the power lines were roughly extracted by the elevation histogram threshold method. Then, considering the characteristics that the vegetation canopy was higher than the distribution network line in the distribution network area, the KNN data points of the roughly extracted power line point cloud were obtained, and the point cloud was projected on the horizontal plane, and whether the point cloud was a power line point cloud was judged by the linear measurement of the point cloud.

  Result  According to the existence of missing power line point clouds, all the power line point cloud clusters are obtained through a region growing mode, and on this basis, the catenary formula of each power line point cloud cluster is calculated through the catenary formula, and the point cloud with a fitting distance less than the threshold is merged as the same power line point cloud.

  Conclusion  The proposed method aims at the problem of rapid power line extraction in inspection applications and overcomes the problem of power line point cloud missing and vegetation impact in the process of power line extraction, so this method can achieve power line point cloud extraction with high efficiency and accuracy.