An artificial vision system used for the measurement of the overhead wire in railway applications

In this paper a system for measuring the wear of the overhead contact wire of the Spanish Railway Network is presented. The system is capable of measuring the cross section of the overhead wire without physical contact at high speed (160 km/h), with a rate of error less than 5%. In the paper, the main challenges of the problem are described and the selected solutions presented. The measuring method is based on an artificial vision system. The system consists of five linear CCD cameras and a processing subsystem based on transputers. The basic problems of the processing algorithm are described. Finally, the current state of the project is presented and points of possible improvements are shown