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To maintain the reliability, availability, and sustainability of electricity supply, electricity companies regularly perform visual inspections on their transmission and distribution networks. These inspections have been typically carried out using foot patrol and/or helicopter-assisted methods to plan for necessary repair or replacement works before any major damage, which may cause power outage. This solution is quite slow, expensive, and potentially dangerous. In recent years, numerous researches have been conducted to automate the visual inspections by using automated helicopters, flying robots, and/or climbing robots. However, due to the high accuracy requirements of the task and its unique challenges, automatic vision-based inspection has not been widely adopted. In this paper, with the aim of providing a good starting point for researchers who are interested in developing a fully automatic autonomous vision …