Rail Profile Measurement Based on Line-structured Light Vision

High-speed railway in China has undergone rapid development in recent years. Technology for structure measurement is recognized as an important aspect of steel rail quality inspection. The shape of the rail welding base is mainly gauged using mechanical contact measurement technology. Matching this technology with the escalating demands for quality inspection of steel rails is a challenging task. In this paper, a structured light measurement approach is proposed and employed which intersects the rail through the structural light plane projected by inner and outer laser sensors. These sensors form a laser light stripe curve containing the profile information of the rail surface. By processing laser light bars using image analysis and contour reduction techniques, 3-D profiles of the rails are generated. The laser plane is fitted using the coordinate points of the laser light bars converted between the image and world coordinate systems. A new calibration method based on the parallel moving target for line-structured light is proposed to improve the calibration and address the issue caused by the limited number of the extracted calibration points during free target calibration. The rail profile, including the geometric dimension, straightness, and twist of the rail, are then measured. By comparing the measured profile with the standard contour of the rails, the rail wear can then be quantitatively assessed. The experimental results show that the proposed measurement system outperforms the traditional single index detection.