Semantic Segmentation of Transmission Corridor 3D Point Clouds Based on CA-PointNet++

Abstract

Automated extraction of key points from three-dimensional (3D) point clouds in transmission corridors provides technical support for digital twin construction and risk management of the power grid. However, accurately and efficiently segmenting the point clouds of transmission corridors remains a challenging problem. Traditional segmentation methods for transmission corridors suffer from low accuracy and poor generalization ability, and the potential of deep learning in this field has been overlooked. Therefore, the PointNet++ deep learning model is employed as the backbone network for the segmentation of 3D point clouds in transmission corridors. Additionally, given the distinct distribution of key components, an end-to-end CA-PointNet++ architecture is proposed by integrating the Coordinate Attention (CA) module with PointNet++. This approach captures long-distance spatial contextual features and improves feature saliency for more precise segmentation. Furthermore, CA-PointNet++ is evaluated on a dataset of 3D point clouds collected by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) equipped with Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) for inspecting transmission corridors. The results show that CA-PointNet++ achieved 93.7% overall accuracy (OA) and 67.4% mean Intersection over Union (mIoU). Comparative studies with established deep learning models confirm that our proposed CA-PointNet++ exhibits high accuracy and strong generalization ability for point cloud segmentation tasks in transmission corridors.