Recognition and Calibration of Rail Profile Under Affine-Distortion-Based Point Set Mapping

Rail section profile accurate measurement techniques are critical to guarantee the transport security and reduce the maintenance cost. However, the profile may make an affine transformation under vehicle vibration. It is a challenge to identify and calibrate the affine distorted profiles in the 2-D laser displacement system (LDS). By profound observation and discussion on triple primitives including rail jaw, railhead inner line, and rail waist curve, we found the difference between normal profiles and distorted ones. To measure the difference quantitatively, we proposed a novel curve similarity measurement method, i.e., point set mapping (PSM), in this paper. By constructing PSM from the standard profile to the measured one on the triple matching primitives, the fast recognition and accurate calibration of rail profile under affine distortion were implemented. The accuracy and efficiency of the system were verified by experiments and comparisons with related methods. The results show that the PSM is faster and more robust than the universal Hausdorff distance on the similarity measure, and the performance of the modified particle swarm optimization is superior for profile distortion calibration. Furthermore, the LDS can run at a speed of 12.86 km/h under our experimental setup, which is far higher than that of the rail maintenance train (up to 5 km/h).