Measure Utility Pole Lean in Video Files

​A leaning utility pole is an early warning sign, but finding them across a service territory is slow work. Inspection usually requires a crew who can check poles one at a time or a specialized survey vehicle that most budgets cannot justify. The roads in question already get driven every day, often by someone with a phone mounted on the windshield. The open question is whether that ordinary video can produce a number precise enough to act on.

​In this live session, Roboflow’s Brian Guilfoyle will demonstrate how he turned an Android phone on a windshield mount into a pole inspection tool. Using 125 annotated images, he fine-tuned an RF-DETR Segmentation model to detect pole shafts, then built a pipeline that tracks each pole and measures its lean.

​You will see the full pipeline, from a per-frame angle measurement to the logic that locks in one trusted angle per pole, and how the results join to GPS to map hundreds of poles. Brian will close with the engineering lessons: what a single camera can and cannot see about lean in three dimensions, and how the multiple views captured during a drive-by could triangulate the rest.