Neural Radiance Fields-Based 3D Reconstruction of Power Transmission Lines Using Progressive Motion Sequence Images

Sensors (Basel). 2023 Nov 30;23(23):9537. doi: 10.3390/s23239537.

Abstract

To address the fuzzy reconstruction effect on distant objects in unbounded scenes and the difficulty in feature matching caused by the thin structure of power lines in images, this paper proposes a novel image-based method for the reconstruction of power transmission lines (PTLs). The dataset used in this paper comprises PTL progressive motion sequence datasets, constructed by a visual acquisition system carried by a developed Flying-walking Power Line Inspection Robot (FPLIR). This system captures close-distance and continuous images of power lines. The study introduces PL-NeRF, that is, an enhanced method based on the Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) method for reconstructing PTLs. The highlights of PL-NeRF include (1) compressing the unbounded scene of PTLs by exploiting the spatial compression of normal L∞; (2) encoding the direction and position of the sample points through Integrated Position Encoding (IPE) and Hash Encoding (HE), respectively. Compared to existing methods, the proposed method demonstrates good performance in 3D reconstruction, with fidelity indicators of PSNR = 29, SSIM = 0.871, and LPIPS = 0.087. Experimental results highlight that the combination of PL-NeRF with progressive motion sequence images ensures the integrity and continuity of PTLs, improving the efficiency and accuracy of image-based reconstructions. In the future, this method could be widely applied for efficient and accurate 3D reconstruction and inspection of PTLs, providing a strong foundation for automated monitoring of transmission corridors and digital power engineering.

Keywords: 3D reconstruction; FPLIR; NeRF; PTLs; progressive motion sequences.