Abstract: The aerial platform could significantly increase the efficiency of electric patrol and reduce its costs in rural distribution network, due to its wide area. However, the angle and distance of shooting are not controllable, and the illumination of environment is also capricious, which impose great challenges on the application of aerial electric patrol. In this paper, a contour information based universal broken strands detection method is proposed. Specifically, the segments of cable in the image are detected by LSD (line segment detector), and the length of the line segment is used to filter the non-wire line segments, controlling the total detection time. Meanwhile, the detection accuracy has been significantly improved by adopting the ABM (active basis model) algorithm. Simulation results validate the effectiveness and the practicality of the proposed methods.