STUDY ON METHOD FOR ASSESSING THE CONDITION OF JOINT GAP AND FILLING LAYER AROUND CIRCULAR STOPPER OF SLAB TRACK USING IMAGES

Abstract

 Maintenance of railway track facilities is carried out by track engineers who go to the site to measure and to visually inspect the track and facilities, which places a heavy burden on the track engineers. Therefore, there is a need to streamline this work using measurement and image processing technologies, which have been rapidly evolving in recent years. In this study, images of the rail head and inside of the gauge were acquired by a profile camera (3D camera) installed on a cart. We proposed an algorithm to measure the joint gap and the gap of the filling layer around the circular stopper of the slab track from the images. The proposed algorithm was applied to the images acquired while running a cart on a commercial line and a maintenance base line, and the results were compared with manual measurements. The results showed that the proposed algorithm can measure the joint gap with an accuracy of around 0.5 mm and the gap of the filling layer around the circular stopper with an accuracy of around 1 mm.