scholarly journals LiDAR Point Cloud Recognition of Overhead Catenary System with Deep Learning

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (8) ◽  
pp. 2212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shuai Lin ◽  
Cheng Xu ◽  
Lipei Chen ◽  
Siqi Li ◽  
Xiaohan Tu

High-speed railways have been one of the most popular means of transportation all over the world. As an important part of the high-speed railway power supply system, the overhead catenary system (OCS) directly influences the stable operation of the railway, so regular inspection and maintenance are essential. Now manual inspection is too inefficient and high-cost to fit the requirements for high-speed railway operation, and automatic inspection becomes a trend. The 3D information in the point cloud is useful for geometric parameter measurement in the catenary inspection. Thus it is significant to recognize the components of OCS from the point cloud data collected by the inspection equipment, which promotes the automation of parameter measurement. In this paper, we present a novel method based on deep learning to recognize point clouds of OCS components. The method identifies the context of each single frame point cloud by a convolutional neural network (CNN) and combines some single frame data based on classification results, then inputs them into a segmentation network to identify OCS components. To verify the method, we build a point cloud dataset of OCS components that contains eight categories. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can detect OCS components with high accuracy. Our work can be applied to the real OCS components detection and has great practical significance for OCS automatic inspection.

Sensors ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (11) ◽  
pp. 3675 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hao Cui ◽  
Qingwu Hu ◽  
Qingzhou Mao

With the increase in the number of service years for high-speed railways, the foundation of the rail track suffers from settlement, which causes rail track irregularity. To adjust the position of the track and meet track regularity demands, several components of the fastening system will be replaced by different sized components. It is important to measure the exact geometric parameters for the components of a fastening system before adjusting the track. Currently, the measurement process is conducted manually, which is laborious and error-prone. In this paper, a real-time geometric parameter measurement system for high-speed railway fastener based on 2-D laser profilers is presented. Dense and precise 3-D point clouds of high-speed railway fasteners are obtained from the system. A fastener extraction method is presented to extract fastener point cloud and a region-growing algorithm is used to locate key components of the fastener. Then, the geometric parameter of the fastener is worked out. An experiment was conducted on a high-speed railway near Wuhan, China to verify the accuracy and repeatability of the system. The maximum root-mean-square-error between the manual measurement and the system measurement is 0.3 mm, which demonstrates adequate accuracy. This system can replace manual measurements and greatly improve the efficiency of geometric parameter measurements for fasteners.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 884
Author(s):  
Chia-Ming Tsai ◽  
Yi-Horng Lai ◽  
Yung-Da Sun ◽  
Yu-Jen Chung ◽  
Jau-Woei Perng

Numerous sensors can obtain images or point cloud data on land, however, the rapid attenuation of electromagnetic signals and the lack of light in water have been observed to restrict sensing functions. This study expands the utilization of two- and three-dimensional detection technologies in underwater applications to detect abandoned tires. A three-dimensional acoustic sensor, the BV5000, is used in this study to collect underwater point cloud data. Some pre-processing steps are proposed to remove noise and the seabed from raw data. Point clouds are then processed to obtain two data types: a 2D image and a 3D point cloud. Deep learning methods with different dimensions are used to train the models. In the two-dimensional method, the point cloud is transferred into a bird’s eye view image. The Faster R-CNN and YOLOv3 network architectures are used to detect tires. Meanwhile, in the three-dimensional method, the point cloud associated with a tire is cut out from the raw data and is used as training data. The PointNet and PointConv network architectures are then used for tire classification. The results show that both approaches provide good accuracy.


Author(s):  
Jing Chen ◽  
Anyuan Li ◽  
Chunyan Bao ◽  
Yanhua Dai ◽  
Minghao Liu ◽  
...  

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (21) ◽  
pp. 6387 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaohan Tu ◽  
Cheng Xu ◽  
Siping Liu ◽  
Shuai Lin ◽  
Lipei Chen ◽  
...  

As overhead contact (OC) is an essential part of power supply systems in high-speed railways, it is necessary to regularly inspect and repair abnormal OC components. Relative to manual inspection, applying LiDAR (light detection and ranging) to OC inspection can improve efficiency, accuracy, and safety, but it faces challenges to efficiently and effectively segment LiDAR point cloud data and identify catenary components. Recent deep learning-based recognition methods are rarely employed to recognize OC components, because they have high computational complexity, while their accuracy needs to be improved. To track these problems, we first propose a lightweight model, RobotNet, with depthwise and pointwise convolutions and an attention module to recognize the point cloud. Second, we optimize RobotNet to accelerate its recognition speed on embedded devices using an existing compilation tool. Third, we design software to facilitate the visualization of point cloud data. Our software can not only display a large amount of point cloud data, but also visualize the details of OC components. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RobotNet recognizes OC components more accurately and efficiently than others. The inference speed of the optimized RobotNet increases by an order of magnitude. RobotNet has lower computational complexity than other studies. The visualization results also show that our recognition method is effective.


2018 ◽  
Vol 91 ◽  
pp. 496-506 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xi-Yang Liu ◽  
Jin-Fang Peng ◽  
De-Qiang Tan ◽  
Zhi-Biao Xu ◽  
Jian-Hua Liu ◽  
...  

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (14) ◽  
pp. 2181
Author(s):  
Hangbin Wu ◽  
Huimin Yang ◽  
Shengyu Huang ◽  
Doudou Zeng ◽  
Chun Liu ◽  
...  

The existing deep learning methods for point cloud classification are trained using abundant labeled samples and used to test only a few samples. However, classification tasks are diverse, and not all tasks have enough labeled samples for training. In this paper, a novel point cloud classification method for indoor components using few labeled samples is proposed to solve the problem of the requirement for abundant labeled samples for training with deep learning classification methods. This method is composed of four parts: mixing samples, feature extraction, dimensionality reduction, and semantic classification. First, the few labeled point clouds are mixed with unlabeled point clouds. Next, the mixed high-dimensional features are extracted using a deep learning framework. Subsequently, a nonlinear manifold learning method is used to embed the mixed features into a low-dimensional space. Finally, the few labeled point clouds in each cluster are identified, and semantic labels are provided for unlabeled point clouds in the same cluster by a neighborhood search strategy. The validity and versatility of the proposed method were validated by different experiments and compared with three state-of-the-art deep learning methods. Our method uses fewer than 30 labeled point clouds to achieve an accuracy that is 1.89–19.67% greater than existing methods. More importantly, the experimental results suggest that this method is not only suitable for single-attribute indoor scenarios but also for comprehensive complex indoor scenarios.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (16) ◽  
pp. 3345 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chen ◽  
Qin ◽  
Xia ◽  
Bao ◽  
Huang ◽  
...  

The dimension detection of high-speed railway track slabs is one of the most important tasks before the track slabs delivery. Based on the characteristics of a 3D scanner which can acquire a large amount of measurement data continuously and rapidly in a short time, this paper uses the integration of 3D scanner and the intelligent robot to detect the CRTSIII (China Railway Track System) track slab supporting block plane, then the dense and accurate supporting block plane point cloud data is obtained, and the point cloud data is registered with the established model. An improved Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC) plane fitting algorithm is also proposed to extract the data of supporting block plane point cloud in this paper. The detection method is verified and the quality analysis of the detection results is assessed by a lot of real point cloud data obtained on site. The results show that the method can meet the quality control of CRTSIII finished track slab and the detection standard. Compared with the traditional detection methods, the detection method proposed in this paper can complete the detection of a track slab in 7 min, which greatly improves the detection efficiency, and has better reliability. The method has wide application prospects in the field of railway component detection.


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 172988141877394 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ye Han ◽  
Zhigang Liu ◽  
DJ Lee ◽  
Wenqiang Liu ◽  
Junwen Chen ◽  
...  

Maintenance of catenary system is a crucial task for the safe operation of high-speed railway systems. Catenary system malfunction could interrupt railway service and threaten public safety. This article presents a computer vision algorithm that is developed to automatically detect the defective rod-insulators in a catenary system to ensure reliable power transmission. Two key challenges in building such a robust inspection system are addressed in this work, the detection of the insulators in the catenary image and the detection of possible defects. A two-step insulator detection method is implemented to detect insulators with different inclination angles in the image. The sub-images containing cantilevers and rods are first extracted from the catenary image. Then, the insulators are detected in the sub-image using deformable part models. A local intensity period estimation algorithm is designed specifically for insulator defect detection. Experimental results show that the proposed method is able to automatically and reliably detect insulator defects including the breakage of the ceramic discs and the foreign objects clamped between two ceramic discs. The performance of this visual inspection method meets the strict requirements for catenary system maintenance.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jinming Zhang ◽  
Xiangyun Hu ◽  
Hengming Dai ◽  
ShenRun Qu

It is difficult to extract a digital elevation model (DEM) from an airborne laser scanning (ALS) point cloud in a forest area because of the irregular and uneven distribution of ground and vegetation points. Machine learning, especially deep learning methods, has shown powerful feature extraction in accomplishing point cloud classification. However, most of the existing deep learning frameworks, such as PointNet, dynamic graph convolutional neural network (DGCNN), and SparseConvNet, cannot consider the particularity of ALS point clouds. For large-scene laser point clouds, the current data preprocessing methods are mostly based on random sampling, which is not suitable for DEM extraction tasks. In this study, we propose a novel data sampling algorithm for the data preparation of patch-based training and classification named T-Sampling. T-Sampling uses the set of the lowest points in a certain area as basic points with other points added to supplement it, which can guarantee the integrity of the terrain in the sampling area. In the learning part, we propose a new convolution model based on terrain named Tin-EdgeConv that fully considers the spatial relationship between ground and non-ground points when constructing a directed graph. We design a new network based on Tin-EdgeConv to extract local features and use PointNet architecture to extract global context information. Finally, we combine this information effectively with a designed attention fusion module. These aspects are important in achieving high classification accuracy. We evaluate the proposed method by using large-scale data from forest areas. Results show that our method is more accurate than existing algorithms.


Author(s):  
Shibin Gao ◽  
Gaoqiang Kang ◽  
Long Yu ◽  
Dongkai Zhang ◽  
Xiaoguang Wei ◽  
...  

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