Developing a program to detect plastic bags hanging on overhead railway power lines through the use of drone photography

抄録

There is an ongoing problem affecting railway companies, caused by plastic garbage flying on to overhead power lines. When such an issue occurs, the general way to deal with it is as follows - when a station employee receives a notice, they will patrol the area by foot to visually confirm the issue. However, there are several problems with this method, as secondary hazards may subsequently occur, and a significant amount of time may occur before the plastic hazard is discovered. Meanwhile, the railway companies, in an effort to deal with this issue, have begun practical field tests using drone photography. However, the footage shot by the drones will still need to be verified by human eyes, and currently, there are no methods of automated detection of plastic hazards being conducted at this time. This report will explore the development of a method enabling the automated detection of such plastic hazards on overhead wires through binary coded processing, using aerial footage shot by drones, and investigate the benefits of such a method. Furthermore, we considered the practical applications of such a method, and developed a GUI program that will be compatible with several different formats of image sizes.