JPH0891220A - Train bottom surface image monitor system - Google Patents

Abstract

PURPOSE: To easily and effectively inspect the bottom surfaces of trains and the like for the various kinds of railways. CONSTITUTION: The system is equipped with a licenser camera 22 which is provided within a train bottom surface monitor chamber 10 provided underneath a railway track to periodically photograph the whole width of a train bottom surface through a slit 20 provided for the ceiling of the chamber, and with a controller 28 which controls both the scanning period of the licenser camera 22 and the quantity of exposure in response to a train as a monitoring object, takes out images detected by the licenser camera 22 continuously with respect to the train, and transmits the images to a remote space. Therefore, the system is also equipped with a memory means 42 which is provided for a place parted from the train bottom surface monitor chamber 10 to store the images transmitted from the controller 28, and with a monitor means 40 which reads out each image out of the memory means 42 on demmand, and can indicate each image over a monitor television 44 by a given outputting means, or can print out each image to a video printer 46.

Description

Detailed Description of the Invention

[0001]

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION 1. Field of the Invention The present invention relates to a train bottom surface image monitoring system used for maintenance of trains of various railways.

[0002]

2. Description of the Related Art In general, one of maintenance works for trains of various railways is to inspect the bottom surface of the train. Conventionally, in order to inspect the bottom surface of a train, a person pulls the train into an inspection facility such as a train operation area, and a person goes under the train to inspect it. Therefore,
It was very inefficient because it required a very large amount of labor and that the train had to be pulled in, so the work could not be done quickly.

[0003]

As described above, the bottom surface inspection of the conventional trains of various railways requires a great deal of labor and is inefficient. The present invention has been made in view of the above circumstances, and an object of the present invention is to provide a train bottom surface image monitoring system capable of easily and efficiently performing bottom surface inspections on trains of various railways.

[0004]

According to the present invention, there is provided a train bottom surface passing through an upper part through a slit hole provided in a train bottom surface monitoring room ceiling provided in a train bottom surface monitoring room provided under a train track at a monitoring point. Line sensor camera for cyclically capturing the entire width of the, and according to the train to be monitored, by controlling the scanning period and exposure amount of the line sensor camera, to the train passing over the slit hole On the other hand, a controller that continuously captures images detected by the line sensor camera and transmits the images to a remote place, and stores an image transmitted from the controller, which is provided at a location distant from the train bottom monitoring room. And a monitoring device having a function of reading out a corresponding image from the storage device in response to a request and outputting the image in an arbitrary form. Train bottom image monitoring system characterized by Bei was.

[0005]

According to such a construction, the two-dimensional CCD camera cannot be included in the field of view because it is necessary to detect an elongated image in order to capture the entire width and length of the train bottom. For this reason, a 1-dimensional CCD camera is used to continuously shoot the width direction of the train bottom from the minimum required slit holes in the lower part of the track at a scanning cycle normalized by the planned train passage speed and store it in a digital memory. The two-dimensional image is obtained on the memory.

Further, the iris control is performed by the method of controlling the aperture of the camera lens in proportion to the change of the exposure amount by changing the scanning period, so that a stable image is obtained. In addition, when the bottom of the train is viewed from below, the shadow is dark, and therefore the line sensor field of view of the bottom of the train is illuminated with an illumination lamp.

[0007]

An embodiment of the present invention will be described below with reference to the drawings. FIG. 1 is a block diagram showing the configuration of a train bottom surface image monitoring system according to an embodiment of the present invention. As shown in FIG. 1, the train bottom image monitoring system includes a train bottom monitoring room 10 for actually detecting a train bottom image, and a visual inspection based on train bottom image data transmitted from the train bottom monitoring room 10. Is provided at a remote location 12 with respect to the train bottom monitoring room 10 in which

As shown in FIG. 2, the train-bottom monitoring room 10 is provided in the lower part of the train track, and a slit hole 20 is formed in the ceiling so that the entire train can be seen from the room. When passing, the rail 30 and a part of the train bottom surface 32 can be seen as shown in FIG. 3 (viewed from the arrow AA ′ in FIG. 1).

The train bottom monitoring room 10 is composed of a line sensor camera (also called a one-dimensional CCD camera) 22, an electric diaphragm lens 24, an illuminator 26, and a controller 28.

The line sensor camera 22 has a slit hole 2
The angle of view is set so that the entire train width is within the field of view through 0, and the image of the train bottom is detected. The electric diaphragm lens 24 can be remotely controlled by a controller 28. The illuminator 26 illuminates the train bottom surface through the slit hole 20, and the line sensor camera 2
2 enables the image of the bottom of the train to be detected.

The controller 28 has a communication function of controlling each part to detect the train bottom image data to be transmitted to the remote place 12 and transmitting / receiving the data to / from the remote place 12.

The remote place 12 is provided with a monitoring device 40, a storage device 42, a monitor television 44, and a video printer 46. The monitoring device 40 receives the train bottom surface image data sent from the controller 28 in the train bottom surface monitoring room 10 and performs control for visual inspection based on the train bottom surface image data. The storage device 42 is controlled by the monitoring device 40 and stores the train bottom surface image data. The monitor television 44 and the video printer 46 display or print out an image for visual inspection based on the train bottom image data.

Next, the operation of this embodiment will be described.
The controller 28 in the train bottom monitoring room 10 is installed in the remote area 1
The train information to be monitored is stored in advance by the communication function with 2. The train information includes, for example, a train number, a scheduled point passage time, an estimated passage speed, a total train length, and the like.

The controller 28 determines the vertical resolution (horizontal resolution / field width / horizontal pixel number) of the line sensor camera 22 in accordance with the scheduled passage speed of the scheduled train, prior to the scheduled passage time of the train obtained by referring to the train information. ), The scanning cycle of the line sensor camera 22 is switched. This is for the following reasons.

In this system, the width direction of the train passing through the slit 20 is photographed by the line sensor camera 22 at each scanning cycle and stored in a digital memory (not shown) in the controller 28. The resolution in the train width direction is determined by the number of pixels of the line sensor camera 22 (one-dimensional CCD camera) and the field of view width. For example, if the field of view width of 4 m is photographed by a one-dimensional CCD of 1000 pixels, the width direction resolution is 4 mm / pixel.

On the other hand, the length direction is determined by the moving speed of the train and the scanning period. The aspect ratio of the image is always 1:
It is not necessary to set it to 1, but if it is extremely different, it will be a stretched picture or a contracted picture and it will be difficult to see, so the resolution in the width direction and the resolution in the length direction will be the same depending on the planned train passage speed so that it will be about 1: 1. The scanning cycle is changed so that

When this control is not performed (when the scanning cycle is constant), an image contracted in the length direction is detected for a fast train, and an image expanded in the length direction is detected for a slow train. It will be detected.

For example, in order to match the resolution in the width direction of 4 mm / pixel, if the train speed is 72 Km / h, the scanning cycle is 0.2 ms. In this way, by controlling the scanning cycle, it is possible to detect an easily viewable image suitable for visual inspection.

The controller 28 controls the electric exposure amount for the line sensor camera 22 by, for example, iris controlling the electric diaphragm lens 24 in proportion to the change in the exposure amount by changing the scanning period of the line sensor camera 22. .

That is, the exposure amount of the CCD is changed by changing the scanning cycle of the line sensor camera 22. If the scanning cycle is short, the exposure amount will be small, and if the lens diaphragm is constant, a dark image will be detected. In this system, in order to keep the brightness of the image constant, the diaphragm control of the electric lens is performed according to the scanning cycle to obtain a stable image.

For example, when the scanning period of the line sensor camera 22 is halved, the controller 28 controls the electric aperture lens 24 to double the aperture to make the exposure amount constant.

In this way, after the scanning cycle and the exposure amount are controlled according to the train, the image of the bottom surface of the train that has passed over the train bottom surface monitoring room 10 is detected by the line sensor camera 22 through the slit hole 20. . The output video signal from the line sensor camera 22 is A / D converted and stored in a digital memory (not shown) in the controller 28.

The controller 28 judges the arrival and passage of the train by checking the change with the image captured in the previous cycle in the digital memory, and frames the output video signal of the line sensor camera 22 from the arrival of the train to the passage. It is temporarily stored in a memory (not shown).

The controller 28 reads out an image from the frame memory and outputs it to a JPEG (Joint Photographic Expert).
Group) image compression. The JPEG method is a joint group JPEG of CCITT and ISO.
It is a still image compression method standardized in. Image compression is performed for the following reasons.

The train bottom image data has a very large capacity. For example, when the A / D conversion of the output video signal output from the line sensor 22 is performed with 256 gradations, it becomes 8 bits / pixel. For example, when a field width of 4 m is photographed by a one-dimensional CCD with 1000 pixels in the width direction, the horizontal resolution is At 4 mm / pixel, the required memory capacity is 1 KByte / line.

When the vertical scanning is performed with a scanning cycle having the same resolution, for example, if the total length of the connected trains is 80 m, then 4
Since scanning is performed every mm, the image of 20K lines is captured, and the train bottom image capacity is 20 MByte / sheet.

In this system, the image data is compressed to 1 / several tens by compressing the image using the JPEG system, and the memory capacity required for storing the image data is reduced, and the controller 28 transfers data to the remote place 12. Image data communication time is shortened.

The controller 28 stores the compressed image in the digital memory as train bottom image data in association with the train number and transmits it to the remote place 12. On the other hand, the monitoring device 40 at the remote location 12 stores the train bottom surface image data sent from the controller 28 in the storage device 42.

Here, the monitoring device 40 receives the train bottom image data corresponding to the target train, the output form, etc. from the operator input through an input device (keyboard or the like) not shown. Is read from the storage device 42, image processing such as enlargement, reduction, division to a designated image size is performed, and display on the monitor television 44 or printout by the video printer 46 is executed.

For example, FIG. 4 shows an example of output to the monitor television 44 or the video printer 46. As shown in FIG. 4, the elongated image of the bottom of the train can be divided and displayed or printed out. The display or printout thus output can be used to visually inspect the bottom surface of the train at a remote location 12 away from the train.

[0031]

As described in detail above, according to the present invention, the bottom image of the entire width and length of the train passing through the monitoring point during operation can be photographed and stored in real time and arbitrarily displayed or printed out. Therefore, the visual inspection of the bottom of the train can be performed easily and efficiently.

[Brief description of drawings]

FIG. 1 is a block diagram showing the configuration of a train bottom surface image monitoring system according to an embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 2 is a diagram showing an installed state of a train bottom monitoring room in the present embodiment.

FIG. 3 is a diagram showing a relationship between a slit hole and a train bottom surface in the present embodiment.

FIG. 4 is a diagram showing an output example to a monitor television or a video printer in the present embodiment.

[Explanation of symbols]

10 ... Train bottom monitoring room, 12 ... Remote area, 20 ... Slit hole, 22 ... Line sensor camera (one-dimensional CCD camera), 24 ... Electric diaphragm lens, 26 ... Illuminator, 28 ... Controller, 40 ... Monitoring device, 42 … Memory, 44…
Monitor TV, 46 ... Video printer.

Claims (1)

[Claims] 1. An image of the entire width of the train bottom, which is provided in the train track lower part of the monitoring point and has a slit hole in the ceiling and is installed in a train bottom monitoring room, which passes through the slit hole and passes through the upper part periodically, Line sensor camera and the train to be monitored, the scanning period and exposure amount of the line sensor camera are controlled to continuously detect the train passing through the slit hole by the line sensor camera. A controller that captures the captured image and transmits the image to a remote location; a storage unit that is provided at a location distant from the train floor monitoring room for storing the image transmitted from the controller; Reading the corresponding image from the storage means,
A train bottom image monitoring system, comprising: a monitor having a function of outputting in any form;