A new approach based on image processing for detection of wear of guide-rail surface in elevator systems

Elevators ensure transportation of people inside buildings and increase their life quality. High-rise buildings whose number is increasingly going up today has one or more elevator cabs to provide vertical transportation. A great number of people use elevators in many buildings such as business centres, hotels, hospitals and shopping centres daily. It is highly essential for the elevators used by many people daily to operate constantly. In the event of sudden failure of elevators during operation, people inside them face with a tough situation. Also, people have difficulty during the maintenance-repair period of elevators. Elevator system has counterweight system in order to balance the weight of elevator cab. A guide-rail system has been developed to limit the movements of elevator cab and counterweights on horizontal axis. When an elevator system is operational, cab and counterweight system move reversely. The common failures in elevators are usually seen in the components such as elevator guide-rail system, ropes and motors.  In this study, a system based on image processing has been developed in order to prevent wear on guide-rail surface in elevators. In the proposed method, real-time condition monitoring is performed by cameras using built-in system. The images of elevator guide-rail surface are captured via four digital cameras fixed onto elevator cab. The image-processing methods are applied on the images captured by cameras and hence the wears on the surface of guide-rails are detected. The surface of guide-rail is firstly detected in the proposed method. Then, image segmentation and mathematical morphology are applied on the image of guide-rail surface and the wears on the surface of rail are detected. The failure extent of the wear failures detected are calculated. By processing the images captured by four cameras during movement of elevator, the results for surface of guide-rails are obtained. Using these results, reporting is performed. An elevator prototype has been created in order to carry out tests for development of the proposed method. The tests have been conducted by fixing the built-in system and cameras onto this elevator prototype. It is considerably advantageous to detect the failures on elevator guide-rails through image-processing methods. Following a literature review, it is seen that the proposed method is a new approach.