Utility Vegetation Management Software for LiDAR

The challenge

Vegetation outages are expensive and preventable

Corridor LiDAR captures precise 3D data, but processing hundreds of miles has meant specialist software and weeks of manual work.

Traditional approach

Visual inspections from trucks or helicopters
Inspectors estimate clearances and mark approximate locations
By the time a hazard tree falls, it is already too late
LiDAR sits on hard drives, too expensive and slow to process

Lidarvisor AI

Upload corridor LiDAR, get classified data back
Threats identified, clearances measured, coordinates ready
Wire detection, encroachment and fall-in risk handled automatically
Minutes instead of weeks

What it does

Five passes over the corridor

Infrastructure detection

Wire, Pole & Tower Classification

Automatic extraction of power line infrastructure.

Wires, poles, towers and other transmission structures are identified and separated from surrounding vegetation and terrain. No manual classification.

Automatic conductor detection
Tower and pole identification
Works with any LiDAR sensor

Classify infrastructure

Power line conductors extracted from a corridor scan

Threat detection

Vegetation Encroachment Detection

Find vegetation violating your clearance zones.

Lidarvisor analyses the relationship between vegetation points and the detected infrastructure, flagging where growth is approaching or already violating your clearance requirements.

Custom clearance buffer zones
Each finding sorted into the zone it falls in, with its distance to the wire
Each finding names its span and its nearest tower
GPS coordinates for every threat

Detect encroachment

Vegetation encroachment detected along a power line corridor

Risk assessment

Fall-In Risk Detection

Find danger trees before the next storm.

Not every threat is encroachment. A 60-foot tree standing 50 feet from the line is a fall-in risk waiting for weather. Lidarvisor identifies trees tall enough to strike infrastructure if they fall, even when they sit outside the clearance zone today.

Tree height versus distance analysis
Storm damage risk identification
Prioritised hazard tree lists

Assess fall-in risk

Trees flagged as fall-in risks near a power line

Field ready

Risk Reports with GPS Coordinates

Navigate crews directly to every hazard.

Every identified threat comes with coordinates your crews can navigate to. No vague descriptions, no hand-drawn maps — field crews drive straight to each hazard.

CSV and PDF export formats
Zone and distance to the wire for every item
A corridor summary by span in the vegetation report
Mobile-ready GPS coordinates

Generate reports

Report view of a fallen tree risk on a corridor

Power line vectorization

Tower and Span Inventory

Every span and every support, measured.

Every conductor comes out as a 3D line that knows the two towers it hangs between, with its span length, its sag and its clearance to the ground and to vegetation, as surveyed on the day of the flight. Every support carries its type, its height and its lean. The whole inventory reads in a Towers panel under the viewer, so you do not have to download a file to see which tower is leaning.

Span, sag and ground and vegetation clearance on every conductor
Tower lean along and across the line, against watch and alert bands you set per project, at no extra cost
Sort, filter and search the towers and spans, cut sections through any tower, and export the table as CSV
Poles inferred from the wires where the cloud is too sparse to show them, flagged as inferred
Add a support the detector missed by clicking its top, drag a misplaced one or change its type: added and moved supports are measured against the cloud and the spans on either side recomputed, at no credit cost
A tower_uid per support that stays the same through your edits, for your asset system
Conductors, towers and 3D tower structures in GeoJSON, SHP and DXF, with poles on POWER_POLES and lattice towers on POWER_TOWERS in the DXF

Export vectors

Lattice transmission tower in the classified point cloud with its fitted 3D structure and the conductors attached

Real project, real output

A power line corridor, before and after one run

Demo 2 is a DJI drone survey of 17.6 hectares in France, crossed by overhead lines. It opens in every Lidarvisor account, so you can switch each finding on and off over the line yourself.

Drone point cloud of fields and tree rows crossed by overhead power lines, before processing — Before The corridor as uploaded

The same corridor with conductors in magenta, tree crowns in green, right of way findings in cyan and fall risk trees in red — After Conductors, tree crowns and findings over the bare earth model

Both views come from the Lidarvisor viewer, from the same camera position, on 12 October 2026.

Surface: 17.59 ha
Supports found: 17
Conductor lines: 77
Whole run: 53 min 54 s

Settings of this run: buffers at 1, 2 and 5 m around the wires, a 5 m clearance below them, 15 m of right of way on each side. Findings: 13 in the buffers, 7 under the clearance, 82 in the right of way, and 5 of the 107 trees measured are tall enough to reach a conductor if they fell. The run time covers every layer this project holds, terrain and contours included.

Deliverables

What lands in your download

Each of these is a separate layer you can switch on, delivered alongside the classified cloud.

Layer	What it is	Formats
Conductors	Wire centrelines in 3D, with span, length, sag and clearance	GeoJSON · SHP · DXF
Towers & poles	Support positions with type, height and lean, plus 3D structures	GeoJSON · SHP · DXF
Clearance zone	Vegetation found inside the clearance distance you set	CSV · GeoJSON · SHP · DXF
Buffer zones	Vegetation found in each of the distance bands you set	CSV · GeoJSON · SHP · DXF
Right of way zone	Vegetation found in the maintained corridor	CSV · GeoJSON · SHP · DXF
Fallen tree risk	Crowns of the trees tall enough to reach the line if they fall	CSV · GeoJSON · SHP · DXF
Risk report	Threat location, zone and distance, with a corridor summary by span	PDF · CSV

The conductor, support, finding and report formats listed here are the files the Demo 2 project above holds today. Demo projects download on every plan, the free one included.

How it works

From LiDAR scan to field-ready report

Process corridor data from any platform — drone, helicopter or fixed-wing.

01

Upload

Drag and drop LAS or LAZ files from drone, helicopter or fixed-wing surveys.

02

Process

The AI classifies ground, vegetation and power line infrastructure automatically.

03

Analyze

Review encroachment zones and fall-in risks in the browser viewer, with clearance measurements.

04

Export

Download risk reports with GPS coordinates and send crews to the high-priority threats.

Applications

UVM applications

Transmission Corridors

Analyse hundreds of miles of high-voltage line, identifying threats along the whole route.

Distribution Networks

Process urban and rural distribution surveys, prioritising work orders by severity.

Post-Storm Assessment

Rapidly process new captures after major storms to find vegetation damage and impacts.

Regulatory Compliance

Clearance measurements and reports with coordinates, ready for your compliance files.

Questions

Frequently asked questions

What LiDAR data does Lidarvisor process for UVM?

Corridor LiDAR in LAS or LAZ format from any platform — drone, helicopter or fixed-wing. The AI handles point clouds from any sensor and classifies ground, vegetation and power line infrastructure without manual parameter tuning.

How does encroachment detection work?

After classification, Lidarvisor analyses the spatial relationship between vegetation points and the detected infrastructure. You define the required clearance buffers, and the system flags all vegetation inside those zones. The zone a finding falls in tells you how close it is to the conductors, and each finding records its distance to the wire, its span and its nearest tower.

What's the difference between encroachment and fall-in risk?

Encroachment means vegetation is already growing into the clearance zone around your conductors. Fall-in risk identifies trees currently outside that zone but tall enough to strike infrastructure if they fall. Both matter for a complete vegetation management programme.

What reports and exports are available?

Classified point clouds in LAS, risk reports in CSV or PDF with GPS coordinates, and power line, tower and finding layers in GeoJSON, SHP or DXF. Reports carry threat location, the zone it falls in and its distance to the wire, with field-ready coordinates for crew navigation. The vegetation report adds a corridor summary by span, and the project report lists leaning towers against your own bands.

How long does corridor processing take?

It depends on the area and the point density. Demo 2, a 17.6 ha corridor, took 54 minutes for every layer, terrain and contours included. Larger projects take longer, and you get an email when processing completes.

Documentation

Learn the UVM workflow

How to run vegetation management analysis with Lidarvisor.

User Documentation
Guides, workflows and output reference

Stop guessing where vegetation threatens your lines

Your LiDAR data already contains the answers. Lidarvisor extracts the threats, measures the clearances, and delivers coordinates your crews can use today.

Start free

No software to install. No parameters to configure. View pricing or contact our team

Utility Vegetation Management Software Find Threats Before They Cause Outages