In order to improve the efficiency of power transmission line inspection by Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), a new method was proposed for detecting broken transmission lines and defects of foreign body based on the perception of line structure. The transmission line image acquired by UAV was easily influenced by the background texture and light, the gradient operators of horizontal and vertical direction which can be used to detect the line width were used to extract line objects in the inspection image. The study on calculation of gestalt perception of similarity, continuity and colinearity connected the intermittent wires into continuous wires. Then the parallel wire groups were further determined through the calculation of parallel relationship between wires. In order to reduce the detection error rate, spacers and stockbridge dampers of wires were recognized based on a local contour feature. Finally, the width change and gray similarity of segmented conductor wire were calculated to detect the broken part of wire and foreign object defect. The experimental results show that the proposed method can detect broken wire strand and foreign object defect efficiently under complicated backgrounds from the transmission line of UAV images.
Images of transmission tower acquired by Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) have high resolution and complex background, the traditional stitching algorithm using feature points can detect a large number of feature points from background which costs much time and affects the matching accuracy. For solving this problem, a new image mosaic algorithm with quick speed and strong robustness was proposed. To reduce the influence of the background, each image was first segmented into foreground and background based on a new implementation method of salient region detection. To improve the feature point extraction and reduce the computation complexity, transformation matrix was calculated and image registration was completed by ORB (Oriented Features from Accelerated Segment Test (FAST) and Rotated Binary Robust Independent Elementary Features (BRIEF)) feature. Finally, the image mosaic was realized with image fusion method based on multi-scale analysis. The experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm can complete image mosaic precisely and quickly with satisfactory mosaic effect.