A hardware system for passively detecting wires from a mobile transportation system is provided. The hardware system includes a main processor in the hardware system that uses plural commands to manage a preprocessor module and a linker module, wherein the pre-processing module pre-processes a digital image taken from a digital camera of the transport system and reduces non-wire like clutter from the digital image and identifies pixels that can be classified as wire like; and the linker module links the identified pixels to determine if a wire like structure is present and a binary output from the linker module is sent to an output select module that allows a user to select a video output.