High-precision rail movement measurement under ambient-light changes via video image progressing

The advancement of train technology makes monitoring railroad lines increasingly important. The use of cameras to measure rail movement can be done in real-time monitoring. The camera, however, is easily influenced by variations in ambient light intensity. Therefore, this research proposes a method to address the issue. The system can calculate rail displacement without being affected by ambient light intensity and monitor rail displacement in real-time. By using a flexible field programmable gate array-based framework that uses parallel and pipelined architecture to process image data, the system’s efficiency is improved by 24.7%. The system can accurately locate and measure displacement in complex environments despite interference from light and surroundings. Following experimental validation, the detection system achieves 0.07 mm precision and 95.2% detection accuracy in varying light.