DEDICATED MULTIPROCESSOR SYSTEM FOR AUTOMATIC RAIL FLAW DETECTION

Abstract

An automatized ultrasonic rail flaw detection system has been developed for real-time rail flaw detection and evaluation. The whole system installed on a testing vehicle, working under rough environmental conditions must determine the internal irregularities of the rail, document them on the basis of a table containing the danger information, and immediately mark the rail in order to make easy the identification of the faulty segments for maintenance staff. During the measurement, three pairs of ultrasonic transmitters and receivers, with different orientation, scan the rail providing indirect information about the vertical section. The rail flaw detection procedure itself is a twodimensional pattern recognition problem consisting of image reconstruction, spatial filtering with thresholding and classifying phases.