High-Speed Frame Grabber for Track Monitoring Systems

In recent years, image recognition, along with improvements in image processing technology, has become a mainstream method of object inspection. The quality of images directly affects the image-recognition rate. Track monitoring systems play an important role in ensuring safety and preventing derailments of trains, on the basis of the prevailing track conditions. Therefore, the conditions of track systems are very important. In this research, a high-speed frame grabber system is designed. The triggering rate of its line scan camera can be adjusted to match the vehicle speed of the train, so that the pixels per inch of images captured by this camera are fixed. The hardware equipment of the designed system includes a line scan camera, an image acquisition card, artificial lightings, a contrast sensor, and a system on a programmable chip (SOPC) development board. An exposure time control system is designed on the basis of a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) core. The designed system can acquire clear high-speed images while the vehicle speed changes dramatically. The experimental results confirm the feasibility of using line scan cameras for railway vehicles.