Airborne LiDAR is now becoming a rapid method to acquire three-dimensional coordinates of the ground objects automatically

which has great potential applications on power lines inspection. According to the demand of the intelligent power lines inspection

a power lines extraction method based on spatial domain segmentation was proposed in this paper. First

the method a dopted the elevation histogram statistical method to remove ground objects. Second

pylons along the corridor were identified based on the difference of the point cloud density. Third

single power lines was isolated from each other based on the distance threshold between two neighborhood lines and height threshold between two neighborhood level of lines using a spatial domain segmentation algorithm. Finally

a simplified polynomial model was applied to model the geometry of each power line in three-d imensional space. Experimental results showed that the method can be applied to extract power lines with multiple spans simultaneously

and demonstrated its potential advantages in power-lines inspection application.