TY - JOUR AV - none N2 - Fires or electrical hazards and accidents can occur if vegetation is not controlled or cleared around overhead power lines, resulting in serious risks to people and property and significant costs to the community. There are numerous blackouts due to interfering the trees with the power transmission lines in hilly and urban areas. Power distribution companies are facing a challenge to monitor the vegetation to avoid blackouts and flash-over threats. Recently, several methods have been developed for vegetation monitoring; however, existing methods are either not accurate or could not provide better disparity map in the textureless region. Moreover, are not able to handle depth discontinuity in stereo thus are not able to find a feasible solution in the smooth areas to compute the disparity map. This study presents a cost-effective framework based on UAV and satellite Stereo images to monitor the trees and vegetation, which provide better disparity. We present a novel approach based on the fusion of the convolutional neural network (CNN) and sparse representation that handled textureless region, depth discontinuity and smooth region to produce better disparity map that further used for threat estimation using height and distance of vegetation/trees near power lines and poles. Extensive experimental evaluation on real time powerline monitoring showed considerable imporvemnt in vegetation threat estimation with accuracy of 90.3 in comparison to graph-cut, dynamic programming, belief propagation, and area-based methods. © 2021 Elsevier Inc. N1 - cited By 4 KW - Antennas; Backpropagation; Cost effectiveness; Dynamic programming; Forestry; Graphic methods; Neural networks; Textures; Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) KW - Aerial stereo imagery; Convolutional neural network; Critical infrastructure; Depth discontinuities; Disparity map; Network representation; Power lines; Sparse representation; Textureless regions; Threat estimation KW - Poles KW - aerial photography; artificial neural network; infrastructure; power line; satellite imagery; stereo image; unmanned vehicle KW - Varanidae TI - Fusion of CNN and sparse representation for threat estimation near power lines and poles infrastructure using aerial stereo imagery ID - scholars14778 Y1 - 2021/// SN - 00401625 PB - Elsevier Inc. UR - https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85110382803&doi=10.1016%2fj.techfore.2021.120762&partnerID=40&md5=8d56237ca182abce028a87dbd36c1bbb JF - Technological Forecasting and Social Change A1 - Qayyum, A. A1 - Razzak, I. A1 - Malik, A.S. A1 - Anwar, S. VL - 168 ER -