Removing power lines from digital surface models using OSM data

A digital surface model (DSM) is crucial for various applications, such as visibility analysis, and are often commonly available. Depending on the sampling method of a DSM from 3D point clouds, power lines may be projected into the two-dimensional domain. The resulting artifacts represent a strong obstacle to automatic computation of visibility. To clean free DSM data from these artifacts, we propose an effective method that relies on the available OpenStreetMap (OSM) data and is widely unsupervised. After fetching relevant OSM data and creating buffers around power line features, we apply image processing techniques, including edge detection and Hough transform to accomplish the removal of artifacts left behind by power lines in DSMs. Hereby, care is taken to preserve vegetation under power lines. The proposed method is robust, easily adaptable, and fast, making its application suitable for large-scale data and contributing to the democratization of the access to high-quality geodata processing.