LineShield - A Generalized LiDAR Pipeline for Automated Vegetation Encroachment Detection on Powerlines

Vegetation encroachment on the powerline poses significant risks to the reliability and safety of the power infrastructure. Many LiDAR-Based methods have tried to address this problem, yet these methods lack scalability and generality across different LiDAR collection methods with varying resolutions and data sizes. This paper presents LineShield, a generalized LiDAR-based pipeline for automated vegetation encroachment detection on powerlines. The pipeline addresses these challenges on both airborne and mobile LiDAR datasets. Key components: clustering with DBSCAN for accurate powerline segmentation, PCA-based alignment for standardizing orientation, sliding window traversal for efficient processing of large datasets, voxel downsampling for reducing data complexity, and proximity-based severity classification for prioritizing interventions. Experimental results demonstrate the pipeline’s adaptability across three datasets, namely, ECLAIR, DALES, and Toronto-3D, achieving up to 97.4% detection accuracy and maintaining performance in both urban and rural environments. The approach also provides detailed reporting to help maintenance teams prioritize interventions.