Digital Filtering of Railway Track Coordinates in Mobile Multi–Receiver GNSS Measurements

Abstract

The article discusses an important issue in connection with the technique of mobile Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) measurements of railway track coordinates, which is digital filtering performed to precisely determine railway track axes. For this purpose, a measuring technique is proposed which bases on the use of a measuring platform with a number of appropriately distributed GNSS receivers, where two of them determine the directional base vector of the platform. The receivers used in the research had high measuring frequency in the Real Time Kinematic (RTK) operating mode and enabled correction of the obtained results in post–processing. A key problem discussed in the article is the method for assessing the quality of the measurement results obtained from GNSS receivers, and their preparation for further processing making use of geometrically constrained parameters of the base vector and specialized digital filtering, among other elements, to precisely determining the track axis. The obtained results confirm the applicability of the used method of GNSS signal processing.

Keywords

• track geometry surveying
• GNSS mobile measurements
• condition monitoring
• Savitzky–Golay filter
• Whittaker filter
• sensor data pre–processing