This paper presents a new method for detecting, locating and classifying overhead contact systems (catenary systems) in point clouds collected by mobile mapping systems (MMS) on rail roads. Contrary to many other application types, railway embankments are highly regulated and standardized. Railway infrastructure geometric relations remain roughly unchanged within established regions and have similarities between them. The newly-developed method exploits both these characteristics, as well as the survey process. There are several steps in this approach. Firstly, it restricts the search for catenaries relative to the distance to registered MMS trajectory, then finds possible support structures according to the density of points above the track. Subsequently, the method verifies the structures' presence and classifies the points with the use of the RANSAC algorithm. It establishes the presence of cantilevers, as well as poles or structural beams, depending on the type of detected support structure. The method also determines the coordinates of the identified object on the ground. Finally, a classification is clarified with the use of a modified DBSCAN algorithm. The design method has been verified with data collected in four surveys where the cumulative length of the route was almost 90 km. Over 97% of support structures were correctly detected, and out of these, over 95% were completely classified.

Regular power line inspections are essential to ensure the reliability of electricity supply. The inspections of overground power submission lines include corridor clearance monitoring and fault identification. The power lines corridor is a three-dimensional space around power cables defined by a set distance. Any obstacles breaching this space should be detected, as they potentially threaten the safety of the infrastructure. Corridor clearance monitoring is usually performed either by a labor-intensive total station survey (TS), terrestrial laser scanning (TLS), or expensive airborne laser scanning (ALS) from a plane or a helicopter. This paper proposes a method that uses unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images to monitor corridor clearance. To maintain the adequate accuracy of the relative position of wires in regard to surrounding obstacles, the same data were used both to reconstruct a point cloud representation of a digital surface model (DSM) and a 3D power line. The proposed algorithm detects power lines in a series of images using decorrelation stretch for initial image processing, the modified Prewitt filter for edge enhancement, random sample consensus (RANSAC) with additional parameters for line fitting, and epipolar geometry for 3D reconstruction. DSM points intruding into the corridor are then detected by calculating the spatial distance between a reconstructed power line and the DSM point cloud representation. Problematic objects are localized by segmenting points into voxels and then subsequent clusterization. The processing results were compared to the results of two verification methods—TS and TLS. The comparison results show that the proposed method can be used to survey power lines with an accuracy consistent with that of classical measurements.

This paper details the development of a camera calibration method purpose-built for use in photogrammetric survey production. The calibration test field was established in a hangar, where marker coordinates were measured using a high-precision survey methodology guaranteeing very high accuracy. An analytical model for bundle adjustment was developed that does not directly use the coordinates of field calibration markers but integrates bundle adjustment and survey observations into a single process. This solution, as well as a classical calibration method, were implemented in a custom software, for which the C++ source code repository is provided. The method was tested using three industrial cameras. The comparison was drawn towards a baseline method, OpenCV implementation. The results point to the advantages of using the proposed approach utilizing extended bundle adjustment.