PROPOSAL FOR THE GRANT

of
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY PROJECT SCHEME
(TNSCST)
on
Visualize and Monitoring Railway Track and Through
Drone Imagery

Submitted to
TAMILNADU STATE COUNCIL FOR SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
DOTE CAMPUS,
CHENNAI – 600 025.
Submitted by
Dr.D.C.Joy Winnie Wise
S.Gayathri

Ms.P.Baby Shamini

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

RAJALAKSHMI INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
Approved by AICTE New Delhi & Affiliated to Anna University Chennai
Kuthambakkam Post, National Highway 4, Chembarambakkam,
Chennai, Tamil Nadu 600124, India
1.1. INTRODUCTION

Indian Railway (IR) runs more than 20,000 passenger trains daily, on both long
distance and suburban routes, from 7,349 stations across India. With the growing industrial
development and population, the role of railways in transportation is going to be highly
important in upcoming years. In order to maintain safety and security of public and goods,
frequent inspection of tracks are essential. According to railways accidental statistics, and major
derailments happens due to human failure or infrequent and improper monitoring systems.
Traditionally railway track inspection is carried out using human inspector or through an
automated vehicle that is infrequent and a complex process. In recent years, there has been an
increasing interest in the adoption of drones for monitoring a variety of infrastructures. This
work explores the usage of drones in early warning, situation assessment and decision support
applications.

1.2. OBJECTIVE

The aim of the study

is to preliminarily evaluate drone capabilities in a
railway
monitoring framework including structural faults
and security
threat detection as well as investigation on the
consequences of
natural hazards and intentional attacks.
The aim of the study
is to preliminarily evaluate drone
capabilities in a railway
monitoring framework including structural
faults and security
threat detection as well as investigation on
the consequences of
natural hazards and intentional attacks.
The aim of the study
is to preliminarily evaluate drone
capabilities in a railway
monitoring framework including structural
faults and security
threat detection as well as investigation on
the consequences of
natural hazards and intentional attacks.
The main objective of the work is to evaluate the drone capabilities in a railway
monitoring framework including structural faults and security threat detection and investigation
on the consequences of natural hazards and intentional attacks.

1.3. EXISTING SYSTEM

Existing systems use various approaches such as electro- magnetic inspection, eddy
current testing, ultrasonic techniques and optical methods such as laser and camera mounted on
moving carts to perform various inspection operations on tracks. In recent years, researchers
have used computer vision for railroad component analysis in order to improve efficiency,
objectivity, and accuracy in the inspection systems.

One way of approach is placed the camera on the roof of a train for image acquisition and
further feature extraction was applied on these images to determine the rails. Achieving fully
automated railroad component analysis is still a challenging task.

Another work carried out for automated inspection of the track uses signal processing and
spectral estimation that provides robust detection of periodically occurring track component. The
various methods discussed above are complex in nature for frequent analysis of track condition.
Hence, railway track analysis through drones is studied. Drones provide flexibility to operate at
various heights and in adverse terrains where regular inspection methods cannot be applied.

1.4. METHODOLOGY

Railway Track Image Acquisition using Drone

Ariel Images (Videos are sliced by image frames)

( Videos are sliced by Image frames)

Preprocessing by Gaussian Smoothing

Edge detection by Canny Edge detector

Track detection by applying Morphological operators

Gauge Measurement

Analytical report generation

 Proposed Work Model

Data acquisition

It is method considered as a crucial task in computer vision applications. Acquiring

images and videos of rail tracks is an essential part of the track inspection system. The DJI
phantom 3 professional has 4k camera with Sony sensors capable of producing of 4000 3000
pixel images.

Data Pre-processing

Drone data has various pre-processing challenges such as rectification, calculation of ground
sample distance, extraction of frames from videos, etc. Once still images are obtained, they are
resized and cropped with the help of a script in MATLAB. Further processing is carried out
according to the requirements for achieving the aim. The Gaussian smoothing is applied in order
to remove noise.

Edge detection

To separate the railway tracks from the background, edge detection techniques were used.
Among the techniques applied, it was found that the Canny Edge Detector was giving the most
accurate results. The Canny Edge Detector was used to detect the edges of the track to find the
gradient value. The region of interest is identified and cropped to find the edge detection
mechanism.

Track detection

Before detection of the railway track from the edges, re- moval of small connected pixels was
carried out with application of “bwareaopen” command in MATLAB which have capability to
remove connected pixels below a threshold value. The result in Fig.3 shows the clear edge of the
track. This binary image was scanned column wise and 2D array was created.

Gauge Measurement

The gauge of the railway track is a clear minimum vertical distance between the inner sides of
two tracks is called railway gauge. That is, the distance between the two tracks on any railway
route is known as railway gauge. Approximately sixty percent of the world's railway uses
standard gauge of 1,435 mm. 

The gauge measurement is computed as

Gauge = GSD × No of pixel count, where, GSD is the Ground Sampling Distance

1.5. WORKPLAN

S.No Timeline Process

1. 1 to 3 Months Literature survey

2. 4 to 6 Months Drone Image Acquisition

3. 6 to 8 Months Drone Image Investigation

Developing a Mathematical Model by

4. 8 to 9 Months
applying Canny edge detection

5. 9 to 10 Months Gauge Measurement

6. 10 to 12 Months Optimization

Implementation and Testing in the

7. 12 to 16 Months
respective field

8. 16 to 18 Months Result and discussion