Vegetation Height Extraction of Transmission line Corridor Based on Spaceborne SAR Data

Abstract

Vegetation encroachment in transmission line corridors may cause electric power blackouts. Currently, manual inspection and airborne LiDAR inspection are used to detect dangerous vegetation, but there are problems of low efficiency and small detection range. With the development of the Ubiquitous power Internet of things, traditional inspection methods will gradually be replaced. The development of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) remote sensing technology makes it possible to efficiently and wide-area monitor the risk of vegetation in transmission line corridors. In this paper, a transmission line corridor with the risk of tree discharge in 220 kV Jiangyou-Tianming transmission line is selected as the research object. Based on the ALOS PALSAR dual-polarized satellite data, the improved three-stage algorithm considering the terrain factor is used to extract the tree height in the sample areas along the transmission line corridor. In addition, the accuracy of the extracted tree height was verified by using the airborne LiDAR data collected in the field. The results indicate that the correlation coefficient R between the extracted tree height and the measured one is 0.835, and the RMSE is 1.923 m. Besides, vegetation height extraction of the transmission line corridor with the spaceborne SAR data is feasible, which can provide some reference for the application of threat warning in transmission line corridors.