Systems and methods for visualizing and analyzing a rail surface

Inventors

Dick, Matthew • Liu, Zhipeng • Yilma, Samson

Assignees

Ensco Inc

Abstract

A system for analyzing a railroad track comprises a transport device, a camera coupled to the transport device, an electronic display device, a memory device, and one or more processors. The camera is disposed adjacent to a rail of the railroad track and generates image data reproducible as one or more images of at least a portion of a surface of the rail. The processors can produce an image of the rail surface, which includes a plurality of elongated portions. The image is analyzed to identify any defects that exist within each elongated portion of the rail surface. The processors determine a value of a metric for each elongated portion of the rail surface. The metric is associated with the identified defects. The electronic display device displays a graph indicative of the metric for each elongated portion, the image of the rail surface, or both.

Core Innovation

The invention relates to a railroad rail-inspection system and method that receives image data generated by a camera disposed adjacent to a rail of a railroad track, where the image data is reproducible as an image of a surface of the rail. The method divides the image of the surface of the rail into a plurality of elongated portions across a width of the surface of the rail and analyzes the image to identify one or more defects within each of the plurality of elongated portions of the surface of the rail.

For each elongated portion, the method determines a value of at least one metric associated with the identified one or more defects within that elongated portion. The metric values are determined for each of the plurality of elongated portions of the surface of the rail, and the method causes an electronic display device to display information indicative of the at least one metric for each elongated portion.

In a multi-rail implementation, the method receives first image data generated via a first camera disposed adjacent to a first rail and second image data generated via a second camera disposed adjacent to a second rail, with each image data reproducible as an image of a portion of a surface of the corresponding rail. The method divides each rail image into regions across the width, analyzes the divided images to identify one or more defects within each region for each rail, determines information associated with the identified defects for the first and second rails, and causes the electronic display device to display the determined information for one or both rails.

Claims Coverage

The partial set includes two independent claims: clm-00001 and clm-00012. The inventive features are centered on rail-surface image acquisition, width-based segmentation, defect identification per segmented region, defect-associated metrics per segmented portion or region, and electronic display of the metric-related information, with an additional independent feature set for multi-rail first and second rails and cameras.

Across the independent claims, the core coverage is the combination of rail-adjacent camera image receiving, width-based segmentation, defect identification within each segmented portion or region, determining defect-associated metric values or defect-associated information, and displaying that information via an electronic display device; the second independent claim additionally covers first and second rails with first and second cameras and display for one or both rails.

Stated Advantages

Documented Applications

No documented applications found