Measurement of locations of facilities and detection of obstacles along railway is one of the most important tasks to assure the safety of railway transportation. Since the inspection is required along a very long distance, automatic in-motion inspection is in high demand. A dynamic obstacle detecting system for railway surroundings has been developed.
The system employs a novel laser-sectioning method and allows a precise measurement of locations and shapes of constructions such as a tunnel, platform and bridge. The measured data are compared with the construction gauge, the traffic safety boundary prescribed by statute. A high accuracy was obtained by a novel imaging optics which has a different magnifying power in the horizontal and vertical directions. It enables the conventional light-sectioning method to improve in the accuracy while keeping the field of view sufficiently wide. A real time in-motion measurement was realized by a specially designed pipeline video-rate processor.
In the experiment on the Takayama line of Central Japan Railway, it was confirmed that most objects could be successfully detected and that the accuracy in the range measurement was within 10mm at 7km/h.
