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Railway point cloud object detection

Description

Maintaining, renovation and construction of railway projects require accurate and up-to-date maps of the current rail situation. Obtaining these maps currently is an expensive and time consuming endeavour.

Therefore, a joint project between our research group Ambient Intelligence and Strukton Rail was conceived to automate the process of mapping. To do so, a dedicated measurement train is used which is equipped with a LiDAR. This LiDAR accurately captures the rail environment as a point cloud. Using deep learning a model was trained to detect objects within the point cloud.

As a result, digitalisation of large segments of rail can be done in a short amount of time.

Video

This video shows the results from the PointPillar object detection model. For this proof-of-concept, the following object classes are detected: masts, signals, tension rods, and relay cabinets. The PointPillar implementation from the MMDetection3D framework was used.

References

  1. [Dataset] B. Ton, and Strukton Rail. Annotated Mobile Laser Scans of the Dutch Railway Environment, 4TU.ResearchData, 2024