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Smart Structures and Systems
  Volume 28, Number 6, December 2021 , pages 779-789
DOI: https://doi.org/10.12989/sss.2021.28.6.779
 


Railway sleeper crack recognition based on edge detection and CNN
Gang Wang and Jiawei Xiang

 
Abstract
    Cracks in railway sleeper are an inevitable condition and has a significant influence on the safety of railway system. Although the technology of railway sleeper condition monitoring using machine learning (ML) models has been widely applied, the crack recognition accuracy is still in need of improvement. In this paper, a two-stage method using edge detection and convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed to reduce the burden of computing for detecting cracks in railway sleepers with high accuracy. In the first stage, the edge detection is carried out by using the 3×3 neighborhood range algorithm to find out the possible crack areas, and a series of mathematical morphology operations are further used to eliminate the influence of noise targets to the edge detection results. In the second stage, a CNN model is employed to classify the results of edge detection. Through the analysis of abundant images of sleepers with cracks, it is proved that the cracks detected by the neighborhood range algorithm are superior to those detected by Sobel and Canny algorithms, which can be classified by proposed CNN model with high accuracy.
 
Key Words
    convolutional neural network; edge detection; mathematical morphology operations; neighborhood range algorithm; railway sleeper cracks
 
Address
College of Mechanical & Electrical Engineering, Wenzhou University, Wenzhou, 325035, P.R. China.
 

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