High-speed Railway Rod-insulator Detection

Using Segment Clustering and Deformable Part

Models
1 1 2 1 3
Ye Han , Zhigang Liu , Dah-Jye Lee , Guinan Zhang , and Miao Deng

1
Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu City, Sichuan Province, China
2
Dept. of Electrical and Computer Eng., Brigham Young University
Provo, Utah, USA
3
State Grid Sichuan Electric Power Company, Chengdu City,
Sichuan Province, China
Abstract— Catenary system maintenance is an important task
to the operation of a high-seed railway system. Currently, the
inspection of damaged parts in the catenary system is performed
manually, which is often slow and unreliable. This paper proposes
a method to detect and locate the rod-insulators in the image
taken from the high-speed railway catenary system. Sub-images
containing bar-shaped devices such as cantilever, strut, rod, and
pole are first extracted from the image. Rod-insulator is then
recognized and detected from these bar-shaped sub-images by
using deformable part models and latent SVM. Experimental
results show that the proposed method is able to locate
rod-insulators accurately from the catenary image for the
subsequent detect inspection process. The robustness of this
method ensures its performance in different imaging conditions.
Index Terms—high-speed railway, rod insulators, segment
clustering, deformable part models,
I.
INTRODUCTION
The catenary system that supplies electric power to
locomotive is a crucial component of a high-speed railway. The
maintenance of the catenary system is traditionally carried out
by railway workers who manually search along the railway for
damaged parts that need to be replaced. Systems have been
developed to record the video of the catenary system along the
railway to be reviewed manually. This manual inspection
process is not efficient and does not meet the demand of rapidly
expanding high-speed railway networks. The recognition of
damaged catenary parts heavily depends on human observation.
Non-contact inspection methods based on image processing
have drawn attention from railway companies in the past few
years. Computer is used to analyze images of the catenary
system captured by HD digital cameras to recognize and locate
damaged parts.
Rod-insulator is an important part of a catenary system. It is
used to support other mechanical and electrical components
and insulate the strut from high voltage. Some
safety-threatening conditions may lead to insulation
deterioration and raise the possibility of insulation breakdown
in humid weather. For example, the ceramic discs of the
insulator may be broken and foreign matters may be stuck
between ceramic discs. Regular inspection and maintenance
must be performed to avoid the interruption of railway services
and prevent devastating damages to the railway system.
Methods and tools used to detect faulty insulators include
corona cameras, thermal imaging cameras [1], ultrasonic
sensors, electric field measurement and leakage current
detection [2]. Many image processing-based methods have
been developed. For the detection of the insulators, Wu et al.
proposed an active contour model based on texture distribution
for insulator segmentation [3]. Their method achieves great
segmentation result but is relatively slow. The processing of a
560 × 201 image takes 30.85 seconds [3]. Oberweger et al.
presented an insulator detection method based on local
gradient-based descriptors and a voting scheme for insulator
localization [4]. Liao et al. proposed a multi-scale and
multi-feature local feature descriptor, which combines SPIN
descriptor [5] and RIFT descriptor [6] in a unified framework to
handle the scale variation and rotation of the insulator [7]. Li et
al. used the improved MPEG-7 EHD (edge histogram method)
technique to recognize insulator [8]. Zhao et al. adopted
modified Markov Random Field model to extract the repetitive
geometric structure of the insulator [9]. Cui et al. proposed a
method of segmenting the infrared insulator image using
improved Unit-linking PCNN algorithm [10]. Li et al. proposed
an insulator detection method based on profile projection [11].
Pillars and poles form the main structure of the catenary
system. In this work, the poles and pillars are detected using
segment detection and segment clustering. The input image is
then decomposed into several bar-shaped sub-images for
insulator detection based on the distribution of the pillar and
pole. As for the detection of insulator, histogram of orientated
gradients (HOG) feature is considered. HOG feature is a dense
local descriptive feature first proposed by Dalal and Triggs [12]
and has shown great effectiveness in pedestrian detection,
vehicle detection, and frontal face detection. However the
detection rate of HOG feature drops when the object is
occluded, which is very common in the catenary system. The
deformable part models, first proposed by Felzenszwalb at al
based on HOG features. [13], on the other hand is capable of
handling intra-class variability by combining several
sub-models to allow a wider range of variations in object
appearance. It performs well with occlusion.

‹,(((  ,&,3

 The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In
Section II, we briefly introduce how the catenary images are
captured. In Section III, the image decomposition process is
described. In Section IV, the deformable part model is
discussed. In Section V, the detection accuracy is presented.
Finally, we conclude this paper in Section VI.
II.
IMAGE ACQUISITION
Images of the catenary suspension system are captured by
HD cameras mounted on the top of the inspection vehicle for
analysis. As the vehicle runs along the railway, the cameras are
triggered to capture images when a catenary pillar is detected.
Fig. 1(a) illustrates the image acquisition setup.
In order to minimize the interference of the background and
simplify the process of image, catenary images are captured at
night. LED spotlights are utilized to provide proper
illumination. The image resolution is 2448×2048 pixels, which
is more than adequate for image processing.
The spot and HD camera
Bar-shaped support devices show up in the image as long
white lines. Hough transform was tested to detect these devices.
It worked well but missed most thin poles. A five-step
algorithm as shown in Fig. 3 is developed to address this
challenge. The catenary image is first binarized by
thresholding. This is done without too much challenge because
the image contrast is fairly high. In the second step, the
segments in the binary images are detected. The contours of the
binary image are detected first to recognize the segments in the
binary image. By using the topological analysis method
proposed in [14], sequences of the coordinates of the pixels of
the contours can be derived. The inclination-difference of each
pixel in the contour sequence γk is defined as
γ k = sk + L − sk (1)
⎡y -y ⎤
where sk = arctan ⎢ k + H k ⎥ , ( xk , yk ) is the coordinate of the
⎣ xk + H - xk ⎦
k-th pixel of the contour sequence. If γk is below a threshold
value T, the k-th pixel of the contour sequence will be detected
as part of a segment. In Fig.4, the segments detected in the
image are marked with blue lines.
Catenary Image

Step 1 Image Binaryzation

Border Following
Step 2
Segment Detection

Segment Clustering based on inclination

Fig. 1. The sketch of the imaging system. angle
Step 3
Segment Clustering based on midpoint
III.
IMAGE DECOMPOSITION Connection

The catenary parts that need to be detected or localized Select one Cluster
include insulator, clevis, diagonal tube, and bracket. As shown
Minimal Bounding Rectangle Computng
in Fig.2, they are all installed at the end of the bar-shaped
support devices such as cantilever, strut, rod, and pole. The Step 4 Main Orientation Detection
locations of the catenary parts can be expected to be along the Obtain the Bar-shaped Sub-image by
straight lines representing these bar-shaped devices. In this Extending the Bounding Rectangle on the
paper, the bar-shaped sub-images corresponding to the Main Orientation to the boundary of the
Image.
bar-shaped devices are first detected and extracted from the
input image and are rotated to the horizontal orientation. The Sub-image Saving
program then searches for the insulators along the sub-images No
in the horizontal direction. This allows the classifier to only Step 5 No More Clusters?

recognize insulators in the horizontal direction, which Yes

improves the detection efficiency and accuracy. End

Fig.3 The main steps of the proposed method

Fig.2 The location of the bar-shaped devices (marked with green rectangles)
and catenary parts (four insulators are marked with red rectangles, a clevis is
marked with an orange rectangle). Only a few visible parts are labeled due to Fig. 4. Segment Detection Result
space limitation.


 The segments are then clustered. Each cluster of the clustering is shown in Fig.7. The segments that correspond to
segments corresponds to a bar-shaped devise. There are two the same bar-shaped device are marked with the same color.
steps to cluster the segments. First, the segments are clustered The detail procedure of the mid-point connection clustering
based on their inclination angles. The detail clustering is shown in Fig.8.
procedure is shown in Fig.5. The result of the inclination angle
clustering is shown in Fig.6. The segments that have similar 1. Obtain the coordination of the mid-point of every
inclination angles are clustered into one cluster, and are marked segment.
with the same color. 2. Equally divide the connection lines between the
mid-points of every two segments into 20 parts
1. Compute the inclination angles of all the segments. 3. Repeat for ( n is the number of
2. Compute the absolute distances between any two segments)
segments ( , is the Create segment set
inclination angle of segment i). Repeat for
3. Repeat for , Set
Create segment set Repeat for
If the corresponding point of the end point of the
Repeat for ,
j-th unit in the binary image is non-zero
If (typically T is set to 5 degrees),
( represents the i-th If
segment)
4. Repeat for
Fig. 8. Detail procedure of the mid-point connection clustering
Repeat for , B = false.
If ,
, B =true
If B = true,

5. Repeat for
Eliminate the repeated elements in
Fig. 5. Detail procedure of the inclination angle clustering
Fig. 9 Minimal bounding rectangles of the segment clusters

A minimal bounding rectangle for each cluster of segments is

computed as shown in Fig.9. To obtain the bar-shaped
sub-images, the minimal bounding rectangles are extended
along their main directions to the edge of the image. The
extended minimal bounding rectangles are then cropped after
the image is rotated to make each of them in a horizontal
position to generate the sub-images. Four example sub-images
are shown in Fig.10.
Fig. 6. Inclination angle clustering results

Fig. 10. Samples of the bar-shaped sub-images

IV.
INSULATOR EXTRACTION

. Deformable Part Models trained by latent SVM is used to
Fig. 7. Mid-point connection clustering result recognize and locate the insulator.
The segments in each cluster generated by inclination angle A.
Training Samples
clustering are further clustered based on mid-point connection. Both the positive and negative samples are cropped from the
This is to determine which segments correspond to a certain images captured by the inspection vehicle. Each positive
bar-shaped device. The result of the mid-point connection


sample contains an instance of the insulator. The insulator is
placed in the center of the sample image. Insulators in all
possible lighting conditions are included for training. Each
negative sample randomly contains a non-insulator object. Four
positive and negative samples are shown in Fig. 11).
Fig. 11. Positive (top row) and negative (bottom row) samples of insulators.
B.
Deformable Part Models
Deformable Part Models (DPMs) are seen as the extension of
the histograms of oriented gradients (HOG) features. Unlike
Dalal and Triggs’s method [10] using a single filter to model
the appearance of the object, DPMs are composed of a root
filter and several part filters. The root filter covers the entire
object, while the part filters cover smaller parts of the object.
An HOG feature pyramid is defined by computing HOG
features on each level of a standard image pyramid. The part
filters are generated and applied to the HOG feature pyramid
that is one level lower than the root filter level. This allows the
part filters to capture finer gradient information of the object.
The part model of an object includes not only the
corresponding part filter, but also three other parameters, vi, ai
and bi. vi is a two-dimensional vector defining the ideal position
of the i-th part relative to the position of the root filter. ai and bi
are both two-dimensional vectors specifying coefficients of a
quadratic function measuring a score for each possible
placement of the i-th part that deviates from the ideal position.
The score of an object hypothesis is formulated as
n n
∑ Fi ⋅ φ( H , pi )+ ∑ ai ⋅( x
i , y
i ) + bi ⋅( x
i2, y
i2 )
i=0 i=1
n
∑ F ⋅ φ( H , p ) is the total score of the n filters. Fi is the part
i i
i=0
filter for the i-th part, F0 is the root filter, ϕ(H, pi) is the HOG
feature of the i-th part (H represents the HOG pyramid
mentioned above, pi is the i-th part’s location).
n
2 2
∑ a ⋅( x
, y
) + b ⋅( x
, y

i i i i i i
) is the deformation score of the
i=1
hypothesis. ( x
i , y
i ) is the coordination of the i-th part relative
to the root location derived from vi.
The score of a hypothesis γ can be expressed in terms of the
dot product, β
Ψ(H, γ), between a vector of model parameters β
and a vector Ψ(H, γ)
β is a vector of model parameters, γ is a set
of latent values. The definition of β and γ are shown in (3) and
(4). In the process of object detection, the hypothesis score is
computed in the sliding window. The object is localized when
the hypothesis score reaches the maximum.
β = ( F0 ,...,Fn ,a1 ,b1 ...,an ,bn ) (3)
ψ ( H ,γ ) = ( φ ( H , p0 ),φ ( H , p1 ),...,φ ( H , pn ),
(4)
x
1 , y
1 , x
12 , y
12 ,..., x
n , y
n , x
n2 , y
n2 )
The model of the object class is trained using latent SVM,
proposed in [11]. 180 positive and 120 negative samples are
used for the training process.
V.
EXPERIMENT RESULTS
The result of rod-insulator detection in the bar-shaped
sub-images are shown in Fig.12.
Fig. 12. Detection Results of the deformable part models
Our result shows that the rod-insulators can be accurately
detected from the sub-images using deformable part models.
The detection result is not affected by the variance of scale,
lighting conditions and the texture caused by different
illumination angles. A testing image dataset containing 452
catenary images was created to determine the detection rate of
the proposed method. The testing result is shown in Table 1.
TABLE1. TEST RESULTS TABLE
Number of Detected
Total Image False alarms
Insulators Insulators
452 462 413 5
Total 462 insulators were included in the dataset. 413
insulators were successfully detected (89.4%). Of the 44
insulators that were misclassified, some were incomplete in the
image as shown in Fig.13 and some were a result of bad
(2) segment detection. The algorithm also detected five that are
actually not insulators. Bad localization as shown in Fig. 14
was the cause of these false alarms. They will be discarded in
the subsequent diagnosis of safety-threatening condition.
Fig.13 Incomplete insulator.
Fig.14 Example of false alarm.
VI.
CONCLUSIONS
A method for rod-insulator detection in the catenary
system is proposed in this paper. The segments detected in the
image are clustered to determine a region of interest according
to their angle and mid-point connection. Deformable part
models are used to recognize and localize the insulators in the
image. Our experiments show that the localization result is
good and the detection rate of the insulators is high. The
proposed method shows high reliability that will make the
process of fault detection much easier. Based on the work
presented in this paper, developing a reliable fault detection
method will be the next step.

 REFERENCES
[1]
H. Ha, S. Han, J. Lee, “Fault detection on transmission lines using a
microphone array and an infrared thermal imaging camera,”
Instrumentation and Measurement, IEEE Transactions on., vol. 61, no. 1,
pp. 267-275, Jan. 2012.

[2]
S. C. Oliveira, E. Fontana, “Optical detection of partial discharges on

insulator strings of high-voltage transmission lines,” Instrumentation and
Measurement, IEEE Transactions on., vol. 58, no. 1, pp. 2328-2334, JUL.
2009.

[3]
Q. Wu, J. An, “An active contour model based on texture distribution
for extracting inhomogeneous insulators from aerial images,” Geoscience
and Remote Sensing, IEEE Transactions on., vol. 52, no. 6, pp. 3613-3626,
Jun. 2014.

[4]
M. Oberweger, A. Wendel, H. Bischof, “Visual recognition and fault

detection for power line insulators,” in Proceedings of 19th Computer
Vision Winter Workshop., Feb. 2014, pp. 1–8.

[5]
S. Lazebnik, C. Schmid, J. Ponce, “A sparse texture representation

using affine-invariant regions,” in Proceedings of IEEE Conference on
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition., June. 2003, pp. 319–324.

[6]
S. Lazebnik, C. Schmid, J. Ponce, “A sparse texture representation

using local affine regions,” Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence,
IEEE Transactions on., vol. 27, no. 8, pp. 1265–1278, Aug. 2005.

[7]
S. Liao, J An, “A Robust Insulator Detection Algorithm Based on

Local Features and Spatial Orders for Aerial Images,” IEEE Geoscience
and Remote Sensing Letters., vol. 12, no. 5, pp. 963-967, May. 2015.

[8]
W. G. Li, G. Ye, F. Huang, S. Wang, and W. Z. Chang, “Recognition

of insulator based on developed MPEG-7 texture feature,” in Proceedings
of 3rd International Conference on Image and Signal Processing., June.
2010, pp. 265–268.

[9]
J. Zhao, X. Liu, J. Sun, and L. Lei, “Detecting insulators in the image
of overhead transmission lines,” in Proceedings of 8th International
Conference., July 2012, pp. 442-450.

[10]
K. Cui, B. Li, J. Yuan, and P. Wang, “An Improved Unit-Linking

PCNN for Segmentation of Infrared Insulator Image,” Applied
Mathematics & Information Sciences, vol. 8, no. 6, pp. 2997-3004, Feb.
2014.

[11]
B. Li, D. Wu, Y. Cong, Y. Xia, and Y. Tang, “A method of insulator

detection from video sequence,” in Proceedings of IEEE International
Symposium on Information Science and Engineering, ISISE., Dec 2012,
pp. 386-389.

[12]
N. Dalal, B. Triggs, “Histograms of oriented gradients for human

detection,” in Proceedings of IEEE Computer Society Conference on
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR., June 2005, pp. 886–
893.

[13]
P. Felzenszwalb, R. Girshick, D. McAllester, and D. Ramanan,

“Object detection with discriminatively trained part based models,” IEEE
Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence., vol. 32, no. 9,
pp. 1627-1645, Sep. 2010.

[14]
S. Suzuki, “Topological Structural Analysis of Digitized Binary

Images by Border Following,” Computer Vision, Graphics, and Image
Processing., vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 32-46, Apr. 1985.