Automatic measurement of rail line expansion joint gaps

Abstract

Expansion joint gaps are the gaps which are deliberately left between the rail ends to allow for expansion of the rails in hot weather. Over gapping of these end to end gaps often result in derailments. Therefore in order to prevent dangerous situations and ensuring safety rail lines are periodically inspected. Rail inspection in many countries especially in third world countries, like Bangladesh, is performed manually by a trained human operator who periodically walks along the track searching for visual anomalies. Such manual inspection is lengthy, laborious and subjective. This paper presents a machine vision-based technique to automatically measure the length of rail line expansion joint gaps using morphological processing. This approach has confirmed to successfully detect scenarios of different condition with an accuracy of 89%, thus proving its robustness.