Railway Panorama: A Fast Inspection Method for High-Speed Railway Infrastructure Monitoring

Abstract

At present, the comprehensive inspection trains of all countries in the world are equipped with an environmental video inspection system. The running environment is monitored by manual analysis of the video data, which is labor intensive and inefficient. In this paper, we propose a fast and intelligent inspection method for high-speed railway infrastructure monitoring. A railway environment video is acquired by an imaging device installed on a high-speed integrated detection train, and the forward-looking video is used to establish a panoramic imaging model by constructing the rectangular sampling area having a dynamic width from each frame of the video sequence, which covers the four side scenes of the railway and generate four panoramic images through image stitching technology. The experimental analysis indicates that proposed method makes the examination and analysis of video faster, simpler and more intelligent, which not only simplifies video content and reduces the time cost for users to browse video; but is also more feasible to run automatic identification algorithm on the compressed panoramic image for realizing the automatic intelligent detection of railway environment anomalies.

Keywords

• Image stitching
• panorama
• railway monitoring
• forward-looking video
• high-speed railway