Real-Time Position Estimation of Overhead Line in Railway Applications

In this paper we describe a new method to measure the position of an overhead line in a railway application. The height and stagger of an overhead line can nowadays be measured through a stereo-vision system composed of two line scanner cameras; the existing applications, unfortunately, cause some malfunctioning. In this work we want to test a new method that increases the resolution of wire images positioned in each camera of the stereo system, so that a line scanner with low resolution can be applied. To resolve the problems of stereo matching, a time dependent matching is applied, to always make possible the choice of the correct pair of wire images, even when two or more wires are present in the environment.