Rail Track Detection and Projection-Based 3D Modeling from UAV Point Cloud.

Shima Sahebdivani,Mehdi Maboudi,Hossein Arefi

doi:10.3390/s20185220

Shima Sahebdivani, Mehdi Maboudi + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/s20185220

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Abstract

The expansion of the railway industry has increased the demand for the three-dimensional modeling of railway tracks. Due to the increasing development of UAV technology and its application advantages, in this research, the detection and 3D modeling of rail tracks are investigated using dense point clouds obtained from UAV images. Accordingly, a projection-based approach based on the overall direction of the rail track is proposed in order to generate a 3D model of the railway. In order to extract the railway lines, the height jump of points is evaluated in the neighborhood to select the candidate points of rail tracks. Then, using the RANSAC algorithm, line fitting on these candidate points is performed, and the final points related to the rail are identified. In the next step, the pre-specified rail piece model is fitted to the rail points through a projection-based process, and the orientation parameters of the model are determined. These parameters are later improved by fitting the Fourier curve, and finally a continuous 3D model for all of the rail tracks is created. The geometric distance of the final model from rail points is calculated in order to evaluate the modeling accuracy. Moreover, the performance of the proposed method is compared with another approach. A median distance of about 3 cm between the produced model and corresponding point cloud proves the high quality of the proposed 3D modeling algorithm in this study.

Highlights

Railways are highly efficient means of intra-city and suburban transportation in developed countries, and millions of people around the world use railways to travel
Our aim in this study is to utilize the point cloud obtained from unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) photogrammetry to identify and model railway lines, as one of the essential urban infrastructures, so that we can take advantage of
Due to the nature of the data acquisition from the above, the UAVs do not produce higher quality data compared to terrestrial laser scanners in capturing the details and the side view of rails

Summary

Introduction

Railways are highly efficient means of intra-city and suburban transportation in developed countries, and millions of people around the world use railways to travel. One of the most important and useful tools for this purpose, which has received much attention in recent years, is the use of photogrammetric products, including modeling the railway environment, especially rail lines. These products can be used as the basis for inspection and monitoring purposes. Many studies have been performed using these techniques in order to recognize and inspect railway tracks In most of these studies, the recorded images or videos (using a camera mounted on a train or automatic vehicle) and their analysis are used to help the driver assistance system [4,5,6,7] or automatically detect obstacles along the tracks by extracting railway lines [8].

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