In other research from Down Under, Australia's national science agency, CSIRO, and Powercor Australia have developed a technology said to make it possible for power companies to measure the distance of tree branches from powerlines from the air, important in brushfire prevention.

The technology is expected to save money presently spent on manual inspection, particularly in rural areas. The application was developed for Powercor Australia, the state of Victoria's largest electricity distributor, to automatically measure the distance of tree branches from powerlines.

“Each year Powercor Australia spends millions of dollars making sure our electricity network is free from interference from trees and vegetation,” said Bob Coulter, Powercor Australia's Manager of Technology. “Trees coming into contact with powerlines can pose a serious fire risk to the community, as well as being a major source of power interruptions.”

CSIRO has carried out several studies for Powercor since 1996 to develop a cost-effective airborne image capture and processing system to automatically measure the clearance of trees from powerlines.

With this method, streams of color stereo images are obtained by aircraft carrying a camera on each wing while flying above power lines. Image analysis specialists developed software to identify objects such as powerlines, poles and the surfaces of nearby trees in three dimensions. The software can then measure distances from powerlines to trees.

The technology is a form of stereo computer vision that reconstructs three-dimensional information from a sequence of stereo image pairs of a scene and uses it to measure distances, similar to how human vision works. The two cameras and a computer are like two eyes and brain, which seamlessly work together to estimate how far away objects are from us and each other. However, unlike human vision, this technology can make very accurate measurements.

Any reduction of brushfire exposure is welcome in Australia, where great destructive fires have struck several times during the the recent past. In 1983 one fire killed 71 people and over 300,000 head of livestock. In 1997, 170 wildfires burned simultaneously during the heat of a particularly arid December.