An Accurate and Efficient Vision Measurement Approach for Railway Catenary Geometry Parameters

The geometry status of electric railway catenary is critical to the stability of railway power supplying. An accurate and efficient vision measurement approach for railway catenary geometry parameters (CGPs) is proposed. An image-based system using a binocular vision component composed of two line scan cameras is first described and analyzed, and then a calibration method for the vision component based on 1-D target combining with 1-D displacement platform is investigated. When the onsite inspection is performed by the test train, there are multiple degree of freedom vibrations created by onsite irregularities of railway line. The detection accuracy of CGPs is inevitably degraded due to the vibrations on the results during running. A compensation method to reduce the vibration errors is presented. Experiments carried out in real-life detections validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed system.