Transmission corridors
A corridor survey is flown to answer one question: what is too close to the line. LAZweaver answers it from the cloud rather than from a labelled deliverable somebody prepared first.
What the run does
- Finds the conductors as conductors — grouped into spans, with a curve fitted to each — rather than as a class of points that happen to be high up.
- Finds the structures that carry them, and associates each span with its two ends.
- Measures vegetation and ground against each span at the clearance distance you set, and writes the encroachments out as geometry and as a list.
- Writes the terrain under the corridor at the same time, because the ground clearance under a span is a question about both.
Starting from an unlabelled cloud
On that same substation survey, starting from every point relabelled as unclassified, the conductor and structure extraction reproduced the labelled run exactly.A reproduction of one delivered dataset, not an accuracy rate. No precision or recall figure is published for powerline extraction because none has been measured across more than one site.
That is the property worth having. A corridor survey that arrives as raw returns, with no vendor classification and no DXF, is the normal case and not the difficult one.
What you get
Deliverables go out as LAZ, GeoTIFF, GeoJSON, DXF, shapefile with a .prj, E57, PLY, CSV, OBJ, glTF, LandXML, COPC and 3D Tiles.
In practice, for this work: the flagged points, the encroachment geometry for a GIS, a drawing for the people who work in one, and the report.
Questions we are actually asked
Does it need the conductors to be labelled already?
On that same substation survey, starting from every point relabelled as unclassified, the conductor and structure extraction reproduced the labelled run exactly.
How long does a substation-sized survey take?
Measured on a thirty-five-million-point substation survey on a ten-core laptop: the full preset — powerline, clearance at five metres, trees, footprints, roads and bridges, native COPC and the PDF report — takes seventy-eight seconds.
What clearance distance does it use?
The one you give it. Clearance is a parameter of the run, not a constant in the software, because the distance that matters is set by the voltage class and by whichever standard the utility works to.
What comes out at the end?
Deliverables go out as LAZ, GeoTIFF, GeoJSON, DXF, shapefile with a .prj, E57, PLY, CSV, OBJ, glTF, LandXML, COPC and 3D Tiles.
Can it tell a conductor from a fence or a treetop?
That is what the structure step is for: candidate conductors are grouped into spans and a curve is fitted to each, and a group that does not hang like a conductor is not one. Short jumpers close to the candidate height threshold are the cases worth reviewing, and the report says which they were.
Is the result auditable?
Every run writes what each stage did, which parameters it actually used and which findings it raised, as a page to read and as a machine-readable record beside the deliverables.