Rendering Railway Scenes in Cyberspace Based on Route Panoramas

The high demand from railway safety has promoted the sensing technology to avoid manual inspection that is error-prone, low efficiency, labor-intensive and high costs. However, few works have emphasized railway environmental monitoring so far which is equally important in railway safety maintenance. In this paper, we propose a railway scene rendering system for virtual maneuver and inspection. Based on the route panoramas extracted from a real train-borne video, we generate the compact and high fidelity scenes over a long distance route in cyberspace. We analyze the relation between train motion and the video sampling in order to obtain the route panoramas of the railways at the just-sampling rate. Then, we render scene tunnels based on the route panorama in a virtual space for interactive navigation, inspection, and scene indexing. The experimental results show remarkable advantages in the data storage and automatic inspection. The compact data format with sufficient visual information can be transmitted and released in cyberspace for fast access, maneuver, and automatic retrieval in railway environment monitoring.