A rail wear measurement method based on structured light scanning

Rail wear measurement is a necessary task in railway infrastructure inspection. To acquire the wear amounts accurately with more continuous scanning data, a rail wear measurement method based on structured light scanning is proposed in this paper. The CAD model of the rail is converted into a point set, and the data registration is implemented by aligning the scanning data to the point cloud generated by the CAD model. On a cross section plane of the rail, the vertical and lateral wear amounts are calculated by the nearby points projected onto the plane. To verify the accuracy of wear measurement based on structured light scanning, the wear amounts calculated by laser scanning data are compared. For the comparison, an experiment is designed to ensure that the same plane is sliced in two different kinds of measurement. On the cross section plane, the wear amounts are calculated by the distances from these points to the 2D profile of the rail CAD model, and then the results are compared with those from laser scanning data for the accuracy evaluation. It indicates that the accuracy of the structured light scanning is sufficient for railway track wear measurement.