Keywords

Rail Defects, Rail Gauge, Rail Fasteners, MinGPU, GPGPU

Abstract

In this dissertation, we have developed computer vision methods for measurement of rail gauge, and reliable identification and localization of structural defects in railroad tracks. The rail gauge is the distance between the innermost sides of the two parallel steel rails. We have developed two methods for evaluation of rail gauge. These methods were designed for different hardware setups: the first method works with two pairs of unaligned video cameras while the second method works with depth maps generated by paired laser range scanners. We have also developed a method for detection of rail defects such as damaged or missed rail fasteners, tie clips, and bolts, based on correlation and MACH filters. Lastly, to make our algorithms perform in real-time, we have developed the GPU based library for parallel computation of the above algorithms. Rail gauge is the most important measurement for track maintenance, because deviations in gauge indicate where potential defects may exist. We have developed a vision-based method for rail gauge estimation from a pair of industrial laser range scanners. In this approach, we start with building a 3D panorama of the rail out of a stack of input scans. After the panorama is built, we apply FIR circular filtering and Gaussian smoothing to the panorama buffer to suppress the noise component. In the next step we attempt to segment the rail heads in the panorama buffer. We employ the method which detects railroad crossings or forks in the panorama buffer. If they are not present, we find the rail edge using robust line fit. If they are present we use an alternative way: we predict the rail edge positions using Kalman filter. In the next step, common to both fork/crossings conditions, we find the adjusted positions of rail edges using additional clustering in the vicinity of the edge. We approximate rail head surface by the third degree polynomial and then fit two plane surfaces to find the exact position of the rail edge. Lastly, using rail edge information, we calculate the rail gauge and smooth it with 1D Gaussian filter. We have also developed a vision-based method to estimate the rail gauge from a pair of unaligned high shutter speed calibrated cameras. In this approach, the first step is to accurately detect the rail in each of the two non-overlapping synchronous images from the two cameras installed on the data collection cart by building an edge map, and fitting lines into the edge map using the Hough transform, and detecting persistent edge lines using a history buffer. After railroad track parts are detected, we segment rails out to find rail edges and calculate the rail gauge. We have demonstrated how to apply Computer Vision methods (the correlation filters and MACH filters in particular) to find different types of railroad elements with fixed or similar appearance, like railroad clips, bolts, and rail plates, in real-time. Template-based approaches for object detection (correlation filters) directly compare gray scale image data to a predefined model or template. The drawback of the correlation filters has always been that they are neither scale nor rotation invariant, thus many different filters are needed if either scale or rotation change. The application of many filters cannot be done in real-time. We have succeeded to overcome this difficulty by using the parallel computation technology which is widely available in the GPUs of most advanced graphics cards. We have developed a library, MinGPU, which facilitates the use of GPUs for Computer Vision, and have also developed a MinGPU-based library of several Computer Vision methods, which includes, among others, an implementation of correlation filters on the GPU. We have achieved a true positive rate of 0.98 for fastener detection using implementation of MACH filters on GPU. Besides correlation filters, MinGPU include implementations of Lucas-Kanade Optical Flow, image homographies, edge detectors and discrete filters, image pyramids, morphology operations, and some graphics primitives. We have shown that MinGPU implementation of homographies speeds up execution time approximately 600 times versus C implementation and 8000 times versus Matlab implementation. MinGPU is built upon a reusable core and thus is an easily expandable library. With the help of MinGPU, we have succeeded to make our algorithms work in real-time.

Notes

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Graduation Date

2009

Advisor

Shah, Mubarak

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

College

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Department

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Degree Program

Computer Science

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

CFE0002895

URL

http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0002895

Language

English

Release Date

February 2010

Length of Campus-only Access

None

Access Status

Doctoral Dissertation (Open Access)

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