PAC Interaction Inspection Using Real-Time Contact Point Tracking

Abstract

A good on-line contact, characterized by high-precision measurement, between the pantograph and catenary (PAC) ensures the safety of PAC and subsequently high-speed train operation. Currently, image processing is the mainstream measurement method for detecting contact points, in which the contact point’s real-time tracking in the image sequences with complex background is the method’s core difficulty. In this paper, a contact point surveillant method that can run during the actual operation of the railway is proposed. This surveillant method can be initialized by the global robust detection method and can do real-time tracking by means of kernelized correlation filters, which has high stability in regional tracking. With the help of result refinement and result confidential evaluation methods, this surveillant method can stably and independently obtain real-time and accurate results, which further gives the state analysis based on 3-D positions. The proposed method is tested on image data sets collected from a high-speed train running at 200 km/h, and results corroborate that a high-speed, high-precision, and stable contact point tracking is achievable, which ensures the state measurement’s feasibility by means of the contact point trajectory.