With the development of aerial photogrammetric technology and the digital camera’s spatial resolution. It is possible to use photogrammetric technology in the inspection of power lines. However
there is little published method for automatic extraction of power lines from aerial images. In this paper
an algorithm of automatic extraction of 550kV power lines from complex background in aerial images is presented. Linear feature operators are designed to resist the strong noise and the potential power line pixels are acquired by Ratio operator. PartRadon transform is used to acquire and link the segments. The gaps of the power line segments are filled through similar Kalman filter tracing method. The proposed method is validated by the experimental images.