Abstract

Traditional inspections are typically conducted by humans with binoculars, infrared cameras, optical zoom cameras, or helicopters. However, these methodologies are costly, timeconsuming, labor-intensive, and potentially dangerous for operators. In order to overcome these problems, vision-based automatic inspection robots such as climbing robots and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been intensively investigated. These vision-based inspection robots improve efficiency and accuracy, reduce labor cost, and minimize human exposure to potential risks. We propose a vehicular multi-camera sensor system for automated visual inspection. By adjusting the tilt angles of lateral cameras on the fly, the proposed system automatically captures multi-view images of electric power distribution equipment such as electric poles, insulators, and transformers and detects those objects. To perform these tasks, we propose an object detection based geolocalization method and an algorithm to control our set of motorized cameras. The proposed geolocalization algorithm detects electric poles using the frontal stereo vision system, and then localizes detected objects in 3D GPS coordinates with the help of GPS/IMU information.