An applied method for railway wheel profile measurements due to wear using image processing techniques

Accurate wear prediction on railway wheels and evolution of railway wheels profile can affect the maintenance planning. The objective of this paper is to provide a new applied method for measuring the railway wheel profile with photographing from the railway wheel to measure by image processing techniques. The aim of this new applied method is to measure the wheel profile using images taken from railway wheels and compare it with the original plan. For this purpose, images were taken by using a camera. In this study, all automatic correction options were turned off and brightness and contrast were in normal conditions. The pixel data is converted to double-type data and are placed in the range of zero and one. Then, the input image which is usually as a three-channel or RGB image is converted to a single channel or gray surface image. Images taken from wheel profiles are processed using image processing techniques. Then the lines, curves and shapes in the image are extracted as cross-sectional and continuous curves. The new applied method results by image processing method obtained show good agreement with those achieved in field measurements.