Automatic Processing for Identification of Forest Fire Risk Areas along High-Voltage Power Lines Using Coarse-to-Fine LiDAR Data

Abstract

This work focuses on the automatic identification of forest fire risk areas along high-voltage power lines through the development of a tool and its validation on a real forest area. The tool allows one to automate the whole process, which includes the classification of the point cloud, the computation of the catenary of the wires using different calculation methods, the estimation of the vegetation growth and the identification of the risk areas. To this end, a coarse-to-fine approach is proposed, so that a preliminary analysis is performed with public airborne LiDAR data, and then a more detailed inspection is provided with drone LiDAR data over those areas classified as high risk. The tool and the methodology developed were validated along a high-voltage power line of 53 km in a real forest area. The results show that although the preliminary analysis based on public airborne LiDAR data is more conservative, it is very useful for selecting those areas of higher risk for further analysis with drone LiDAR data.