Visual measurement system for wheel–rail lateral position evaluation

Railway infrastructure must meet safety requirements concerning its construction and operation. Track geometry monitoring is one of the most important activities in maintaining the steady technical conditions of rail infrastructure. Commonly, it is performed using complex measurement equipment installed on track-recording coaches. Existing low-cost inertial sensor-based measurement systems provide reliable measurements of track geometry in vertical directions. However, solutions are needed for track geometry parameter measurement in the lateral direction. In this research, the authors developed a visual measurement system for track gauge evaluation. It involves the detection of measurement points and the visual measurement of the distance between them. The accuracy of the visual measurement system was evaluated in the laboratory and showed promising results. The initial field test was performed in the Vilnius railway station yard, driving at low velocity on the straight track section. The results show that the image point selection method developed for selecting the wheel and rail points to measure distance is stable enough for TG measurement. Recommendations for the further improvement of the developed system are presented

A haze feature extraction and pollution level identification pre-warning algorithm

Copyright © 2020 The Author(s). The prediction of particles less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter (PM2.5) in fog and haze has been paid more and more attention, but the prediction accuracy of the results is not ideal. Haze prediction algorithms based on traditional numerical and statistical prediction have poor effects on nonlinear data prediction of haze. In order to improve the effects of prediction, this paper proposes a haze feature extraction and pollution level identification pre-warning algorithm based on feature selection and integrated learning. Minimum Redundancy Maximum Relevance method is used to extract low-level features of haze, and deep confidence network is utilized to extract high-level features. eXtreme Gradient Boosting algorithm is adopted to fuse low-level and high-level features, as well as predict haze. Establish PM2.5 concentration pollution grade classification index, and grade the forecast data. The expert experience knowledge is utilized to assist the optimization of the pre-warning results. The experiment results show the presented algorithm can get better prediction effects than the results of Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Back Propagation (BP) widely used at present, the accuracy has greatly improved compared with SVM and BP.National Natural Science Fund of China (Grant Nos. 61371143, 61662033)