Real Time Identification of Railway Track Surface Faults using Canny Edge Detector and 2D Discrete Wavelet Transform

Abstract

Usually, railway accidents are caused by train derailment, the mechanical failure of tracks, such as broken rails often caused by lack of railway condition monitoring. Such monitoring could identify track surface faults, such as squats, that act as a catalyst for the track to crack and ultimately break. The research presented in this paper enables real-time identification of railway track faults using image processing techniques such as Canny edge detection and 2D discrete wavelet transformation. The Canny edge detection outperforms traditional track damage detection techniques including Axle Based Acceleration using Inertial Measurement Units and is as reliable as Fiber Bragg Grating. The Canny edge detection employed can identify squats in real-time owing to its specific threshold amplitude using a camera module mounted on a specially designed handheld Track Recording Vehicle (TRV). The 2D discrete wavelet transformation validates the insinuation of the Canny edge detector regarding track damage and furthermore determines damage severity, by applying high sub band frequency filter. The entire algorithm works on a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ utilizing an OpenCV API. When tested using an actual rail track, the algorithm proved reliable at determining track surface damage in real-time. Although wavelet transformation performs better than Canny edge detection in terms of determining the severity of track surface damage, it has processing overheads that become a bottleneck in real-time. To overcome this deficiency a very effective two-stage process has been developed.

Pothole Classification Model Using Edge Detection in Road Image

“…in image processing. The masks include Sobel mask [42], Prewitt mask [43], Robert mask [44], Laplacian mask [45] and Canny mask [46]. The Sobel mask is very sensitive to brightness because it detects even noise as an edge [42].…”

“…Being resistant to noise, the Canny mask has the advantage of utilizing various edge detection masks. However, several masks should be used because only clear edges are detected [46]. To select a filter for extracting the correct pothole contour among Sobel, Prewitt, Robert, Laplacian, and Canny masks through evaluation using PSNR.…”

A Novel Traffic System for Detecting Lane-Based Rule Violation

“…This 2D array is called an accumulator. After that, Canny edge detection [6] is used in the project to check for edges in the collected 2D accumulator array. For every edge pixels of the accumulator it varies the values of (0 − ) and put it in equation 1to get the value of p which will show the lines in the image.…”

“…To continue with Hough line detection, edge of lines needs to be detected. For that Canny edge algorithm [5][6] [8] has been used. It has many stages to it.…”

“…In order to do that, a traffic monitoring system is proposed where several algorithms are used. For example-KNN algorithm [4] for neighbouring characters, Gaussian Elimination for Image Blur and smoothness, Hough Line Transform for straight line detection, Canny Algorithm [5][6] to detect a wide range of edges in images, OpenCV Contour [7] for image and video processing. Python is used as the main programming language in OpenCV platform [8].…”