STEREO RECOGNITION OF THE CONTACT WIRE OF RAILWAYS FOR OBSTACLE DETECTION

The present paper describes a concept for a software system specially designed to detect obstacles in the catenary of railways. Therefore the special requirements as well as the simplifications in comparison with the well known approaches in the automotive application field are discussed. The basics and results of an algorithm, detecting the contact wire by warping the images of two different mounted cameras are shown. Also the first approaches to abstract objects from the catenary and detect them as dangerous obstacles are described.

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