• Spatial Information Research
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.75-84
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• 2014

Power lines are one of the main obstacles causing an aircraft crash and thus their realtime detection is significantly important during flight. To avoid such flight obstacles, the use of LIDAR has been recently increasing thanks to its advantages that it is less sensitive to weather conditions and can operate in day and night. In this study, we suggest a fast method to detect power lines from LIDAR data for flight obstacle avoidance. The proposed method first extracts non-ground points by eliminating the points reflected from ground surfaces using a filtering process. Second, we calculate the eigenvalues for the covariance matrix from the coordinates of the generated non-ground points and obtain the ratio of eigenvalues. Based on the ratio of eigenvalues, we can classify the points on a linear structure. Finally, among them, we select the points forming horizontally long straight as power-line points. To verify the algorithm, we used both real and simulated data as the input data. From the experimental results, it is shown that the average detection rate and time are 80% and 0.2 second, respectively. If we would improve the method based on the experiment results from the various flight scenario, it will be effectively utilized for a flight obstacle avoidance system.