Study on a combined method of Butterworth high-pass filter and Canny edge detector in the application of detecting cargo loading position on railway vehicles

Unbalanced load on railway freight vehicles is an important factor of affecting the railway operation safety. At present, traditional manual detection methods are mainly used among the railway stations that have no condition operating railway detecting equipment, which lead to heavy workload and inaccuracy. It is of great importance to take more available scientific means instead of manual way to detect and manage cargo loading position rapidly, simply and accurately. Digital image processing technology is fast, accurate and highly flexible. But it is rarely used in detecting loading position of railway cargo. On the background of enhancing safety in the railway freight management and information construction, this paper designs a detection system of cargo loading position on vehicles based on CCD image sampling equipment. An adaptive combined method of Butterworth high-pass filter and Canny edge detector is proposed and finally implemented through MATLAB to process the cargo loading image. The result of the processed image demonstrates that the method has following features: quick processing speed, less noise, single response to an edge and continuous edges, which lay a foundation for obtaining changes of cargo position by calculating pixels distance.