TowerDataset: A Heterogeneous Benchmark for Transmission Corridor Segmentation with a Global-Local Fusion Framework

arXiv cs.CV / 4/21/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper introduces TowerDataset, a new heterogeneous benchmark for semantic segmentation of transmission-corridor point clouds aimed at intelligent power-line inspection.
  • TowerDataset includes 661 real-world scenes with about 2.466 billion points, preserving long corridor extents and providing a fine-grained 22-class taxonomy with standardized splits and evaluation protocols.
  • The authors propose a global-local fusion framework that uses a whole-scene branch (NoCrop training plus prototypical contrastive learning) to capture long-range topology and context.
  • A block-wise local branch preserves fine geometric details, and the system fuses and refines both global and local predictions using geometric validation to better handle rare and safety-critical components.
  • Experiments on TowerDataset and two public benchmarks show the benchmark’s realism and the robustness of the proposed fusion approach in complex, heterogeneous scenes, with the dataset planned for release on Hugging Face.

Abstract

Fine-grained semantic segmentation of transmission-corridor point clouds is fundamental for intelligent power-line inspection. However, current progress is limited by realistic data scarcity and the difficulty of modeling global corridor structure and local geometric details in long, heterogeneous scenes. Existing public datasets usually provide only a few coarse categories or short cropped scenes which overlook long-range structural dependencies, severe long-tail distributions, and subtle distinctions among safety-critical components. As a result, current methods are difficult to evaluate under realistic inspection settings, and their ability to preserve and integrate complementary global and local cues remains unclear. To address the above challenges, we introduce TowerDataset, a heterogeneous benchmark for transmission-corridor segmentation. TowerDataset contains 661 real-world scenes and about 2.466 billion points. It preserves long corridor extents, defines a fine-grained 22-class taxonomy, and provides standardized splits and evaluation protocols. In addition, we present a global-local fusion framework which preserves and fuses whole-scene and local-detail information. A whole-scene branch with NoCrop training and prototypical contrastive learning captures long-range topology and contextual dependencies. A block-wise local branch retains fine geometric structures. Both predictions are then fused and refined by geometric validation. This design allows the model to exploit both global relationships and local shape details when recognizing rare and confusing components. Experiments on TowerDataset and two public benchmarks demonstrate the challenge of the proposed benchmark and the robustness of our framework in real, complex, and heterogeneous transmission-corridor scenes. The dataset will be released soon at https://huggingface.co/datasets/tccx18/Towerdataset/tree/main.