A Real Time Visual Inspection System for Railway Maintenance: Automatic Hexagonal Headed Bolts Detection

Transcription

1 A Real Time Visual Inspection System for Railway Maintenance: Automatic Hexagonal Headed Bolts Detection Francescomaria Marino, Arcangelo Distante, Pier Luigi Mazzeo and Ettore Stella # Abstract Rail inspection is a very important task in railway maintenance and it is periodically needed for preventing dangerous situations. Inspection is operated manually by trained human operator walking along the track searching for visual anomalies. This monitoring is unacceptable for slowness and lack of objectivity, because the results are related to the ability of the observer to recognize critical situations. The paper presents VISyR, a patent pending real time Visual Inspection System for Railway maintenance, and describes how presence/absence of the fastening bolts that fix the rails to the sleepers is automatically detected. VISyR acquires images from a digital line scan camera. Data are simultaneously preprocessed according to two Discrete Wavelet Transforms, and then provided to two Multi Layer Perceptron Neural Classifiers (MLPNCs). The cross validation of these MLPNCs avoids (practically-at-all) false positive, and reveals the presence/absence of the fastening bolts with an accuracy of 99.6% in detecting visible bolts and of 95% in detecting missing bolts. A FPGA -based architecture performs these tasks in 8.09 µs, allowing an on-the-fly analysis of a video sequence acquired up at 200 km/h. Index Terms Neural network applications, Rail transportation maintenance, Machine vision, Object recognition, Pattern recognition, Real-time systems. I. INTRODUCTION The railway maintenance is a particular application context in which the periodical surface inspection of the rolling plane is required in order to prevent any dangerous situation. Usually, F. Marino is with the Dipartimento di Elettrotecnica ed Elettronica (DEE), Facoltà di Ingegneria, Politecnico di Bari; via Re David 200; Bari, ITALY. Fax: (+39) ; Phone: (+39) ; marino@poliba.it A. Distante, P.L. Mazzeo and E. Stella are with the Istituto di Studi sui Sistemi Intelligenti per lautomazione (ISSIA) CNR; via G. Amendola 122/D-O; Bari, ITALY. Fax: (+39) ; Phone: (+39) ; {distante, mazzeo, stella}@ba.issia.cnr.it. This work has been partially supported by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MIUR), research project PON RAILSAFE. -1-

2 this task is performed by trained personnel that, periodically, walks along the railway network searching for visual anomalies. Actually, this manual inspection is slow, laborious and potentially hazardous, and the results are strictly dependent on the capability of the observer to detect possible anomalies and to recognize critical situations. With the growing of the high-speed railway traffic, companies over the world are interested to develop automatic inspection systems which are able to detect rail defects, sleepers anomalies, as well as missing fastening elements. These systems could increase the ability in the detection of defects and reduce the inspection time in order to guarantee more frequently the maintenance of the railway network. In this work we introduce VISyR, a patented [1] real time Visual Inspection System for Railway maintanance that is able to detect missing fastening bolts and other rail defects. For sake of conciseness, this paper deals only with the automatic bolts detection, while, hardware and software architecture of a second block, devoted to reveal other kind of defects, are described in [2]. Usually two kinds of fastening elements are used to secure the rail to the sleepers: hexagonalheaded bolts and hook bolts. They essentially differ by shape: the first one has a regular hexagonal shape having random orientation, the second one has a more complex hook shape that can be found oriented only in one direction. In this paper the case of hexagonal headed bolts is discussed. As shown in our previous works [3], [4] and shortly recalled, detection of this kind of bolt results more difficult than that of more complex shapes (e.g., hook bolts) because of the similarity of the hexagonal bolts with the shape of the stones that are on the background. Nevertheless, detection of hook bolts is also treated in Section VII.E -2-

3 Even if some works have been performed, which deal with railway problems -such as track profile measurement (e.g., [5]), obstruction detection (e.g., [6]), braking control (e.g., [7]), rail defect recognition (e.g., [8], [9]), ballast reconstruction (e.g., [8]), switches status detection (e.g., [10]), control and activation of signals near stations (e.g., [11]), etc.- at the best of our knowledge, in literature there are no references on the specific problem of fastening elements recognition (except for our works [3], [4]). The only found approaches, are commercial vision systems [8], which consider only fastening elements having regular geometrical shape (like hexagonal bolts) and use geometrical approaches to pattern recognition to resolve the problem. Moreover, these systems are strongly interactive. In fact, in order to reach the best performances, they require a human operator for tuning any threshold. When a different fastening element is considered, the tuning phase has to be re-executed. Contrariwise, VISyR is completely automatic and needs no tuning phase. The human operator has only the task of selecting images of the fastening elements to manage. No assumption about the shape of the fastening elements is required, since the method is suitable for both geometric and generic shapes. The processing core of VISyR is basically composed by a Bolts Detection Block (BDB) and by a Rail Analyser Block (RAB) [2]. In order to avoid (in practice, completely) false positive detection, BDB intersects the results of two different classifiers. Therefore, it is composed by two 2-D Discrete Wavelet Transforms (DWTs), [12]-[16] which significantly reduces the input space dimension, and by two Multi Layer Perceptron Neural Classifiers (MLPNCs) that recognize the hexagonal headed bolts on the sleepers. BDB gets an accuracy of 99.6% in detecting visible bolts and of 95% in detecting missing bolts, moreover, because of its crossed detecting strategy, reveals only 1 false positive over 2,250 lines of processed video sequence. -3-

4 A FPGA-based hardware implementation (performing BDB computations in 8.09 µs), in cooperation with a simple -but efficient- prediction algorithm (which, exploiting the geometry of the railways, extracts from the long video sequence few windows to be analysed) allow real time performance, since a long sequence of images covering about 9 km has been inspected at an average velocity of 152 km/h, with peaks of 201 km/h. Moreover, because of the FPGA technology chosen for the development, VISyR is characterized by a great versatility. For instance, detection of different kinds of bolts can be performed simply by downloading onto the FPGA different neural weights (generated by a proper training step) during the setup. The paper is organized as follows. In Section II, an overview of VISyR is presented. Section III introduces the developed prediction algorithm. Section IV describes the 2-D DWT preprocessing. The Multi Layer Perceptron Neural Classifier is illustrated in Section V. The implemented hardware architecture is described in Section VI. Experimental results and computing performance are reported in Section VII. Conclusive remarks and future perspectives are given in Section VIII. II. SYSTEM OVERVIEW VISyR acquires images of the rail by means of a DALSA PIRANHA 2 line scan camera [17] having 1024 pixels of resolution (maximum line rate of 67 kline/s) and using the Cameralink protocol [18]. Furthermore, it is provided with a PC-CAMLINK frame grabber (Imaging Technology CORECO) [19]. In order to reduce the effects of variable natural lighting conditions, an appropriate illumination setup equipped with six OSRAM FL light sources has been installed too. In this way the system is robust against changes in the natural illumination. Moreover, in order to synchronize data acquisition, the line scan camera is triggered by the -4-

5 wheel encoder. This trigger sets the resolution along y (main motion direction) at 3 mm, independently from the train velocity; the pixel resolution along the orthogonal direction x is 1 mm. The acquisition system is installed under a diagnostic train during its maintenance route (see Fig. 1). The captured images are inspected in order to detect rail defects: in particular, this paper focuses on the detection of hexagonal headed bolts that fix the rail to the sleepers. This issue is crucial in maintenance process, because it gives information about their eventual absence. Fig. 1. Acquisition System. VISyR s bolts detection is based on MLPNCs. Computing performance of MLPNCs is strictly dependent by: - a prediction algorithm for identifying the image areas (windows) candidate to contain the patterns to be detected; - the input space size (i.e., the number of coefficients describing the pattern). To predict the image areas that eventually may contain the bolts, VISyR calculates the distance between two next hexagonal headed-bolts and, basing to this information, predicts the position of the windows in which the presence of the bolt should be expected (see Section III). -5-

6 For reducing the input space size, VISyR uses a features extraction algorithm that is able to preserve all the important information about input patterns in a small set of coefficients. This algorithm is based on 2-D DWTs [12]-[16], since DWT concentrates the significant variations of input patterns in a reduced number of coefficients (see Section IV). Specifically, both a compact wavelet introduced by Daubechies [12], and the Haar DWT (also known as Haar Transform [16]) are simultaneously used, since we have verified that, for our specific application, the logical AND of these two approaches avoids -almost completely- the false positive detection (see Section VII.B) The logical scheme of VISyR s processing blocks is shown in Fig. 2. Acquisition System 2-D DWT Preprocessing Block (DWTPB) Bolts Detection Block (BDB) MLPN Classification Block (MLPNCB) Long Video Sequence Prediction Algorithm Block (PAB) Rail Coordinates 24x100 pixel window candidate to contain bolts Daubechies DWT (DDWT) Haar DWT (HDWT) D_LL2 150 coefficients (LL2 subband) H_LL2 150 coefficients (LL2 subband) Daubechies Classiffier (DC) Haar Classiffier (HC) & Pass/Alarm Rail Detection & Tracking Block (RD&TB) Rail Profile Defects Detection Block (DDB) Report Rail Analyser Block (RAB) Fig. 2. Functional diagram of VISyR. Rounded blocks are implemented in a FPGA-based hardware, rectangles are implemented in a software tool on a general purpose host. [&] denotes logical AND. A long video sequence captured by the acquisition system is fed into Prediction Algorithm Block (PAB). Moreover, PAB receives a feedback from the Bolt Detection Block (BDB), as well as the coordinates of the railways geometry by the Rail Detection & Tracking Block (RD&TB, a part of the Rail Analyser Block). PAB exploits this knowledge for extracting 24x100 pixel -6-

7 windows where the presence of a bolt is expected (some examples are shown in Fig. 3). Fig. 3. Examples of 24x100 windows extracted from the video sequence containing hexagonal headed bolts. Resolutions along x and y are different because of the acquisition setup. These windows are provided to the 2-D DWT Preprocessing Block (DWTPB). DWTPB reduces these windows to two sets of 150 coefficients (i.e., D_LL 2 and H_LL 2 ), resulting respectively from a Daubechies DWT (DDWT) and a Haar DWT (HDWT). D_LL 2 and H_LL 2 are therefore provided respectively to the Daubechies Classifier (DC) and to the Haar Classifier (HC). The output from DC and HC are combined in a logical AND in order to produce the output of MLPN Classification Block (MLPNCB). It reveals the presence/absence of bolts and produces a Pass/Alarm signal that is online displayed (see Fig. 4), and in case of alarm (i.e. absence of the bolts), recorded with the position into a log file. Fig. 4. VISyR s online monitor. At the moment of this snapshot, VISyR is signaling the presence of left and right bolts. BDB and RD&TB, which are the most computationally complex blocks of VISyR, are implemented in hardware on an Altera s Stratix TM FPGA. PAB is a software tool developed in -7-

8 MS Visual C on a general purpose host. III. PREDICTION ALGORITHM BLOCK PAB extracts from the video sequence the image areas candidate to contain the hexagonalheaded bolts, i.e., only those windows requiring inspection. Because of the rail structure (see Fig. 5), the distance Dx between rail and fastening bolts is constant and a priori known. By this way, automatic railway detection and tracking is fundamental in determining the position of the bolts along the x direction. VISyR performs this task by using RD&TB [2]. Dx Dx Left Bolts Right Bolts Dy Fig. 5. Geometry of a rail. A correct forecast of Dx and Dy notably reduces the computational load. In the second instance PAB forecasts the position of the bolts along the y direction. To reach this goal, it uses two kinds of search: - Exhaustive search; - Jump search. In the first kind of search, a window exhaustively slides on the areas at a (well-known) distance Dx from the rail location, until it finds contemporaneously (at the same y) the first occurrence of the left and of the right bolts. At this point, it determines and stores this position -8-

9 (A) and continues in this way until it finds the second occurrence of both the bolts (position B). Now, it calculates the distance along y between B and A (Dy) and the process switches on the Jump search. In fact, as it is well known, the distance along y between two adjacent sleepers is fixed. Therefore, the Jump search uses Dy to jump only in those areas candidate to enclose the windows containing the hexagonal-headed bolts, saving computational time and speeding-up the performance of the whole system. If, during the Jump search, VISyR does not find the bolts in the position where it expects them, then it stores the position of fault (this is cause of alarm) in a log-file and restarts the Exhaustive search. A pseudo-code describing how Exhaustive search and Jump search commutate is shown in Fig. 6. do Start image sequence to End image sequence; repeat Exhaustive search; if found first left and right bolt store this position (A); until found second left and right bolt; store this position (B); determine the distance along y between B and A; repeat Jump search until found bolts when you expect them end do Fig. 6. Pseudo code for the Exhaustive search - Jump search commutation. IV. 2-D DWT PREPROCESSING BLOCK In pattern recognition, input images are generally pre-processed in order to extract their intrinsic features. The wavelet transform [12]-[16] is a mathematical technique that decomposes a signal in the time domain by using dilated/contracted and translated versions of a single finite duration basis function, called the prototype wavelet. This differs from traditional transforms (e.g., Fourier -9-

10 Transform, Cosine Transform, etc.), which use infinite duration basis functions. Onedimensional (1-D) continuous wavelet transform of a signal x(t) is: 1 t b W( a, b) = x( t) ψ dt (1) a a where ψ t b is the complex conjugate of the prototype wavelet, ψ t b ; a is a time a a dilation and b is a time translation. Due to the discrete nature (both in time and amplitude) of most applications, different Discrete Wavelet Transforms (DWTs) have been proposed according to the nature of the signal, the time and the scaling parameters. 1-D Filters along rows 1-D Filters along columns L Mj-1 xnj samples L LL j (Mj xnj samples) input to the level j+1 LL j-1 (Mj-1xNj-1 samples) output from the level j-1 H Mj-1 xnj samples H L LH j (Mj xnj samples) HL j (Mj xnj samples) H HH j (Mj xnj samples) Fig D DWT: The j th level of subband decomposition. represents decimation by 2. The two-dimensional (2-D) DWT [12]-[16] works as a multi-level decomposition tool. A generic 2-D DWT decomposition level j is shown in Fig. 7. It can be seen as the further decomposition of a 2-D data set LL j-1 (LL 0 being the original input image) into four subbands LL j, LH j, HL j and HH j. The capital letters and their position are related respectively to the applied mono-dimensional filters (L for Low pass filter, H for High pass filter) and to the direction (first letter for horizontal, second letter for vertical). The band LL j is a coarser -10-

11 approximation of LL j-1. The bands LH j and HL j record the changes along horizontal and vertical directions of LL j-1, respectively, whilst HH j shows high frequency components. Because of the decimation occurring at each level along both the directions, any subband at the level j is composed by N j xm j elements, where N j =N 0 /2 j and M j =M 0 /2 j. As an example, Fig. 8 shows how two decomposition levels are applied on an image of a bolt. LL2 LH2 HL2 HH2 LH1 HL1 HH1 Fig. 8. Application of two levels of 2-D DWT on a subimage containing an hexagonal-headed bolt. Different properties of the DWT can be emphasized by using different filters for L and H. Because of this flexibility, the DWT has been successfully applied to a wide range of applications. Moreover, we have found [3], [4] that orthonormal bases of compactly supported wavelets introduced by Daubechies [12] are an excellent tool for characterizing hexagonalheaded bolts with a small number of features containing the most discriminating information, gaining in computational time. Due to the setup of VISyR s acquisition, PAB provides DWTPB with windows of 24x100 pixels to be examined (Fig. 3). Different DWTs, varying the number of decomposition levels, have been experimented in order to reduce this number without losing in accuracy. The best compromise has been reached by the LL 2 subband consisting only of 6x25 coefficients. It, using the classifier described in the following Section, gets an accuracy of 99.9% in recognizing bolts in the primitive windows. Simultaneously, the Block computes also the LL 2 subband of a Haar DWT [16], since we have -11-

12 found that the cross validation of two classifiers (processing respectively D_LL 2 and H_LL 2, i.e., the output of DDWT and HDWT, see Fig. 2) practically avoids false positive detection (see Section VII.B). V. MULTI LAYER PERCEPTRON NEURAL CLASSIFIER Neural networks have been revealed useful tools for many applicative fields, such as extracting data from images (e.g., [20]) and classifications (e.g., [21]). In our classification task, we have focused our attention on neural networks. In fact: - Neural network classifiers have a key advantage over geometry-based techniques because they do not require a geometric model for the object representation [22]; - Neural network classifiers separate the classes using curve surfaces, by this way outperforming K-NN classifiers, which separate the classes by means of linear surfaces. Moreover, K-NN classifiers continuously iterate the training using as feedback the results of the performed classifications, making themselves more complex and computational expensive; - Contrarily to the id-tree, neural networks have a topology very suitable for hardware implementation. Inside neural classifiers, we have chosen the MLP classifiers since in our previous works [3] and [4], they have been revealed more precise than their counterpart RBF in the considered application. VISyR s BDB employs two MLPNCs (DC and HC in Fig. 2), trained respectively for DDWT and HDWT. DC and HC have an identical topology (they differ only for the values of the weights) and are constituted by three layers of neurons (input, hidden and output layer). In the following, DC is described; the functionalities of HC can be straightforwardly derived. The input -12-

13 layer is composed by 150 neurons D (m=0..149) corresponding to the coefficients D_LL 2 (i, _ n m j) of the subband D_LL 2 according to: _ n 2 ( m / 25, mmod 25) D m = D_LL (2) The hidden layer of DC [HC] consists of 10 neurons D (k=0..9); they derive from the _ n k propagation of the first layer according to: 149 D _ nk = f D _ biask + D _ wm, kd _ nm (3) m= 0 whilst the unique neuron D _ n 0 at the output layer is given by: where D _ and w m, k 9 D _ n0 = f D _ bias + D _ wk,0d _ n k (4) k= 0 D are the weights respectively between first/second and second/third _ w k,0 layers. The activation function f ( x), having range ]0, 1[, for both the layers, is: f ( x) x 1 = 1 + e (5) In this scenario, D _ n 0 ranges from 0 to 1 and indicates a measure of confidence on the presence of the object to detect in the current image window, according to DC. The outputs from DC and HC ( D _ n 0 and H _ n 0 ) are combined as follows: ( _ n > 0.9) AND ( H _ 0.9) Presence = D n (6) 0 0 > in order to produce the final output of the Classifier. The biases and the weights are solved using the Error Back Propagation algorithm with an adaptive learning rate [22] and a training set of more than 1,000 samples (see Section VII.A). -13-

14 VI. FPGA-BASED HARDWARE IMPLEMENTATION Today, programmable logics play a strategic role in many fields. In fact, in the last two decades, flexibility has been strongly required in order to meet the day-after-day shorter time-tomarket. Moreover, FPGAs are generally the first devices to be implemented on the state-of-art silicon technology. Therefore, even if FPGAs were initially created for developing little gluelogic, they currently often represent the core of various systems in different fields. In order to allow VISyR to get real time performance, we have directly implemented in hardware its most computational expensive blocks: DWTPB and MLPNCB (as well as RD&TB, which, as previously said, is not described in this paper). We have adopted as development platform Altera s PCI High-Speed Development Kit, Stratix Professional Edition, which, among other features [23], presents a Stratix EP1S60F1020C6 FPGA, 256-MByte PC333 DDR SDRAM, 32-bit or 64-bit PCI and 8/16-bit differential I/O up to 800 Mbps. The Stratix EP1S60F1020C6 FPGA [24] is provided with 57,120 Look Up Table (LUT)- based logic elements, 18 DSP blocks [1] and various memories of different size for globally 5,215,104 bits with a global maximum bandwidth of more than 10Tbits/s. The software environment for friendly designing, simulating and testing is Altera s Quartus II. Fig. 9 (on next page) shows a window of Quartus II CAD tool displaying a top-level schematic of our design. The architecture can be interpreted as a memory: - The task starts when the host writes a 24x100 pixel window to be analysed. In this phase, the host addresses the dual port memories inside the INPUT_INTERFACE (pin -14-

15 address[9..0]) and sends the 2400 bytes via the input line data[63..0] in form of 300 words of 64 bits. - As soon as the machine has completed his job, the output line irq signals that the results are ready. At this point, the host reads them addressing the FIFO memories inside the OUTPUT_INTERFACE. Fig. 9. A top-level schematic of VISyR s bolts detection block, as it can be displayed on Altera s QuartusII CAD tool. A. INPUT INTERFACE The PCI Interface (not explicitly shown in Fig. 9) sends the input data to the INPUT_INTERFACE block, through DataIn[63..0]. INPUT_INTERFACE receives them and divides the input phase from the processing phase, mainly in order to make the processing phase synchronous and independent from delays that might occur on the PCI bus during the input. In addition, it allows the hardware of working at a higher frequency (clkhw signal) than the I/O [1] A DSP block can implement either a 36-bit multiplier, or four 18-bit multipliers, or eight 9-bit multipliers -15-

16 (clkpci signal). B. DAUBECHIES DWT PREPROCESSING Daubechies 2-D DWT preprocessing is performed by the cooperation of the SHIFTREGISTERS block with the DAUB_LL2_FILTER block. For saving hardware resources and computing time, we have discarded the floating point processing mode and we have adopted fixed point precision [2]. Moreover, since we are interested exclusively on the LL 2 subband, we have focused our attention only on that. It can be shown that, for the 2-D DWT proposed by Daubechies in [12] having the 1-D L filter: 0, , , , , ,33267 (7) the LL 2 subband can be computed in only one bi-dimensional filtering step (instead of the classical twice-iterated two monodimensional steps shown in Fig. 7), followed by a decimation by 4 along both rows and columns. Fig. 10 reports the symmetrical 16x16 kernel to be applied. Fig. 10. Symmetrical 16x16 kernel for computing in one 2-D step the LL 2 subband of the DWT based on the 1-D low-pass filter (7). The filtering has to be followed by decimation by 4 along both rows and columns. working up 250 MHz. [2] Before designing the hardware blocks we have tested in software different fixed point precisions. As a result of these experiments, we have verified that the setting using 23 bits for the filter coefficients and 25 bits for the weights of the MLPN classifier detected bolts with an accuracy only 0.3% lower than that one achievable using floating point precision (see Section VII.C). -16-

17 We compute LL 2 directly in only one 2-D step, because: - this requires a controller much simpler than the one used by the separable approach (Fig. 7); - separable approach is greatly efficient in computing all the four subbands of each level. But VISyR s classification process does not need other subbands than LL 2 ; - when fixed point precision is employed, each step of the separable approach produces results with different dynamic, so doing, the hardware used at a certain step becomes unusable for implementing the further steps; - the error (due to the fixed point precision) generated in a unique step does not propagate itself and can be easily controlled. Conversely, propagation occurs along four different steps when LL 2 is computed by means of separable approach. In this scenario, SHIFTREGISTERS implements a 16x16 array which slides on the 24x100 input window shifting by 4 along columns at any clock cycle (cc). This shift along columns is realized by a routing among the cells as that one shown in Fig. 11, that represents the j th row (j=0..15) of SHIFTREGISTERS. The shift by 4 along the rows is performed by INPUT_INTERFACE which feeds into the j th row of the array only the pixels p(m, n) of the 24x100 input window (m=0..23, n=0..99) where: j mod 4=m mod 4 (8) j,0 j,1 j,2 j,3 j,4 j,5 j,6 j,7 j,8 j,9 j,10 j,11 j,12 j,13 j,14 j,15 p(m+4,8), p(m+4,4), p(m+4,0)... p(m,8), p(m,4), p(m,0) p(m+4,9), p(m+4,5), p(m+4, 1)... p(m,9), p(m,5), p(m,1) p(m+4,10), p(m+4,6), p(m+4,2)... p(m,10), p(m,6), p(m,2) p(m+4,11), p(m+4,7), p(m+4,3)... p(m,11), p(m,7), p(m,3) Not used Fig. 11. The j th row of the array of 16x16 shift registers in the SHIFTREGISTERS block. Each square represents an 8-bit register. -17-

18 At any cc, sixteen contiguous rows of the input window are fed in parallel into SHIFTREGISTERS at the rate of 64 bytes/cc (4 bytes of each row for 16 rows) through IN[511..0]. Simultaneously, all the 256 bytes latched in the 16x16 array are inputted in parallel into DAUB_LL2_FILTER through OutToDaubLL256bytes[ ]. DAUB_LL2_FILTER exploits the symmetry of the kernel (see Fig. 10), adding the pixels coming from the cells (j, l) to those ones coming from the cells (l, j) (j=0..15, l=0..15); afterwards, it computes the products of these sums and of the diagonal elements of the array by the related filter coefficients, and, finally, it accumulates these products. As a result, DAUB_LL2_FILTER produces the LL 2 coefficients after a latency of 11 ccs and at the rate of 1 coefficient/cc. These ones are now expressed in 35 bits, because of the growing of the dynamic, and are input into 1LEV_MLPN_CLASSIFIER via InFromDaub[34..0]. We are not interested in higher throughput, since -because of FPGA hardware resources- our neural classifier employs 10 multipliers and can manage 1 coefficient per cc (see Section VI.D). C. HAAR DWT PREPROCESSING Computationally, Haar Transform is a very simple DWT since its 1-D filters are: L=[1/2, 1/2] and H=[1/2, -1/2]. Therefore, any coefficient H_LL 2 (i, j) can be computed in one step according to: 1 H_LL (9) l = 3 k = 3 2 ( i, j) = p(4i + k,4 j + l) 16 l= 0 k = 0 In order to compute (9), we exploit the same SHIFTREGISTERS block used for performing Daubechies DWT and a HAAR_LL2_FILTER block. HAAR_LL2_FILTER trivially adds [3] the data coming from OutToHaar16bytes[255..0] which are the values of the pixels p(m, n) of the 4x4 window centered on the 16x16 sliding array implemented by SHIFTREGISTERS. [3] The scaling by 16 is simply performed by a shift left of the fixed point of 4 positions. -18-

19 By this way, after a latency of 2 cc, HAAR_LL2_FILTER produces 1 coefficient (expressed by 12 bits) per cc and provides it to 1LEV_MLPN_CLASSIFIER via HaarLL2[11..00]. Higher performance is unnecessary, since the data flow of this block is parallel at that of DAUB_LL2_FILTER. D. MULTI LAYER PERCEPTRON NEURAL CLASSIFIER As we have seen in Section V, the MLPN classifier implements two classifiers (DC and HC, see Fig. 2) respectively computing (3)-(4) and the homologous (3 )-(4 ): 149 H _ nk = f H _ biask + H _ wm, kh _ nm (3 ) m= 0 9 H _ n0 = f H _ bias + H _ wk,0h _ n k (4 ) k= 0 Because of the high hardware cost needed for implementing the activation function f(x) -i.e., (5)-, we have decided of implementing in 1LEV_MLPN_CLASSIFIER equations: 149 D _ xk = D _ biask + D _ wm, k D _ nm (10) m= 0 for k= H _ xk = H _ biask + H _ wm, kh _ nm (10 ) m= 0 Equations (11) and (11 ) represent the arguments of the activation functions of (4) and (4 ). Doing so, they are computed in hardware and are returned to the host, that estimates in software f ( D _ ), ( H ) x k f _, (5), and (5 ). Anyhow, (11) and (11 ) represent 3,000 multiplications and x k 3,000 sums which are computed in hardware, vs 20 multiplications, 20 sums, 22 activation functions and the logical evaluation of (7), computed in software by the host. In order to perform this task, 1LEV_MLPN_CLASSIFIER has been provided with two sets of 10 Multiplier-and-ACcumulators (MACs), i.e., D_MAC k and H_MAC k (k=0..9). -19-

20 As soon as a coefficient D_LL 2 (i, j) [H_LL 2 (i, j)] is produced by DAUB_LL2_FILTER [HAAR_LL2_FILTER], the multipliers D_MAC k [H_MAC k ] multiply it in parallel by D _ w m, k [ H _ w m, k ] (m=25i+j, k=0..9) and continue in this way for 150 ccs, one cc for each one of the 150 coefficients of D_LL 2 [H_LL 2 ]. The weights D _ and w m, k H _ w m, k have been preloaded in 20 LUTs during the setup (one LUT for each multiplier, each one storing 150 weights). The accumulator of any D_MAC k [H_MAC k ] is initialized with D_bias k [H_bias k ] and it accumulates the products as soon as they are output from the multipliers. E. OUTPUT INTERFACE Because of its latency, the task of 1LEV_MLPN_CLASSIFIER ends 5 ccs after the last coefficients D_LL 2 (5, 24) and H_LL 2 (5, 24) are provided by DAUB_LL2_FILTER and by HAAR_LL2_FILTER. At this point, the data stored in the 20 accumulators of D_MAC k and H_MAC k (k=0..9) have now respectively 63 bits and 45 bits because of the growing of the dynamic. They are sent to OUTPUT_INTERFACE via DCOut63bitsX10Neurons[629..0] and HCOut45bitsX10Neurons[449..0]. These data are extended in sign and formatted in words of 64 bits by OUTPUT_INTERFACE. Moreover, OUTPUT_INTERFACE serialize them using a FIFO and signals on the irq output that the results are ready. Finally, the host requires these results (signal read) and receives them on the DataOut[63..0] output (1 word/cc). F. EMPLOYED HARDWARE RESOURCES The architecture employs the resources summarized in Table I, which reports also a relative count respect to the available resources on the Stratix EP1S60F1020C6 FPGA. The underutilization of these resources takes into account that also the RD&TB described in [2] has to be -20-

21 implemented on the same FPGA. TABLE I EMPLOYED RESOURCES Employed Resources Available Resources Utilization Total Logic Elements 32,465 57, % DSP Blocks % Memory Blocks (512 bits) [4] % Memory Blocks (4K bits) % Memory Blocks (MRAM) % Total memory bits 339,889 5,215, % PLLs % Total pins % VII. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND COMPUTING PERFORMANCE In order to design and test VISyR s processing core, a long video sequence of a rail network covering about 9 km was acquired. A. MLPN CLASSIFIERS TRAINING Firstly, Error Back Propagation algorithm with an adaptive learning rate [22] was used to determine the biases and the weights of the classifier. The adopted training set contained 391 positive examples of hexagonal-headed bolts with different orientations, and 703 negative examples consisting of 24x100 pixels windows extracted from the video sequence. The remaining video sequence has been used to perform the following experiments. B. FALSE POSITIVE ELIMINATION In defining the preprocessing strategy, we observed that, though the classifier DC, based on Daubechies DWT, reached a very high detection rate (see Section VII.C), it also produced a certain number of False Positives (FPs) during the Exhaustive search. In order to reduce these errors, a cross validation strategy was introduced. Because of its very low computational overhead, Haar DWT was taken into account and tested. HC, a neural [4] Alteras Stratix FPGAs are provided with memories of three different sizes: 512 bits (32 words x 18 bits), 4K bits (128 words x 36 bits) and MRAM (4096 words x 144 bits). -21-

22 classifier working on the LL 2 subband of the Haar DWT, was designed and trained. HC reaches the same detection rate of DC, though revealing much more FPs. Nevertheless, the FPs resulting from HC come from different features (windows) than those causing the FPs output from DC. This phenomenon is put in evidence by Fig. 12. (a) (b) (c) Fig. 12. Detected couples of bolts vs video sequence, analyzed in Exhaustive search (i.e., without jump between couples of detected bolts). (a) Daubechies Classifier; (b) Haar Classifier; (c) Crossed validation. -22-

23 In the diagrams, a spike denotes a detection (both true and false positives) at a certain line of the video sequence revealed by DC (Fig. 12.a) and by HC (Fig. 12.b) while they analyze in Exhaustive search (i.e., without jump between couple of bolts) 4,500 lines of video sequence. Fig. 12.c shows the logical AND between the detections (both True and False Positive) of DC and HC. In other words, it shows the results of (6). As it is evidenced, only 2 FPs over 4,500 analyzed lines (90,000 processed features) are revealed by the crossed validation obtained by the logical AND of DC and HC. Numerical results are reported in Table II. It should be noted that the shown ratio FP/TP is related to the Exhaustive search, but it strongly decreases during the Jump search, which interests more than 98% of the processed lines (See Section VII.E). TABLE II FALSE POSITIVE (EXHAUSTIVE SEARCH) True Positive (TP) False Positive (FP) FP/TP FP/Analyzed Lines Haar DWT 22 (100%) % Daubechies DWT 22 (100%) % AND (Daubechies, Haar) 22 (100%) 2 9% C. ACCURACY EVALUATION We have measured the accuracy of VISyR in detecting the presence/absence of bolts. A fullysoftware prototype of VISyR, employing floating point precision, was executed in trace modality in order to allow an observer to check the correctness of the automatic detections. This experiment was carried out over a sequence covering 3,350 bolts. VISyR detected 99.9% of the visible bolts, 0.1% of the occluded bolts and 95% of the absences (second column of Table III). TABLE III ACCURACY Floating Point Fixed Point Number of examined bolts 3,350 3,350 Number of visible bolts 2,649 2,649 Detected 2,646 (99.9%) 2,638 (99.6%) Number of occluded bolts Detected 1 (0.1%) 1 (0.1%) -23-

24 D. HARDWARE DESIGN DEFINITION Number of absent bolts Detected 20 (95%) 20 (95%) The report (file log) obtained from the above experiment was used as term of comparison for the reports of similar experiments aiming at defining the number of bits per words to be used in the hardware design. The fully-software prototype of VISyR was modified changing the floating point operating mode into the fixed point mode. Different versions of VISyR were compiled with different precisions (i.e., number of bits) both for Daubechies filter coefficients and for the weights of DC and HC. The setting with 23 bits for the filter coefficients and with 25 bits for the weights of both the classifiers led to detect visible bolts with accuracy only 0.3% lower than that obtained using floating point precision (third column of Table II). This setting was considered acceptable, and the hardware design was developed using these specifications. E. PERFORMANCE EVALUATION After the hardware design was completed, simulated and tested it was integrated with the software modules. Therefore the system was tested on the whole video sequence in order to measure the reached computing performance. The results of this test are shown in Table IV. TABLE IV OBTAINED PERFORMANCE Processed lines 3,032,432 [lines] [km] Total elapsed time [sec] Velocity 14,082 [lines/sec] [km/h] Jumped lines 2,980,012 [lines] 98.2% Jump search computational time [sec] 74.3% Jump search computational velocity 18,633 [lines/sec] [km/h] Exhaustively processed lines 52,420 [lines] 1.8% Exhaustive search computational time [sec] 25.7% Exhaustive search computational velocity 946 [lines/sec] 10.2 [km/h] Examined couples of bolts 15,027 These data resulted from a software architecture developed in Visual C++, version 6.00 and executed on a Pentium IV TM at 3.2 GHz with 1 GB of RAM cooperating with the hardware -24-

25 architecture described in Section VI, clocked at 66 MHz and 100 MHz [5], and performing the analysis of a 24x100 window in 8.09 µs (see Fig. 13). Fig. 13. Simulation Report of the VISyR s bolts detection block, as it can be displayed on Altera s QuartusII TM Simulator tool. The last result (72C5E5F952BDA37F) is ready on DataOut[63..0] after 8.09 µs of processing. In the third row of Table IV, for computational time we mean the only time spent in processing by the host and by the FPGA, without considering the time spent for visualization and loading the data. Over than 15,000 couples of bolts have been detected in more than 3,000,000 lines at the velocity of 152 km/h. Moreover, the table shows how the Exhaustive search covers less than 2% of the whole process in terms of lines. Contrariwise the time spent for the Exhaustive search is more than 25% of the total elapsed time. Fig. 14 presents how the two types of search (Jump and Exhaustive) commutate during the process, for a given video sequence. As it is shown by the curve on Fig. 14.a, the maximum elapsed time in the Exhaustive search is less than 3. This means that the Exhaustive search finds a couple of bolts (left and right) after [5] Altera s PCI High-Speed Development Kit supports PCI bus up to 66MHz; the designed circuit into the FPGA can work up to 100 MHz. Therefore, in order to maximize the performance, we use two different clock frequencies: clkpci, that works at 66 MHz and triggers INPUT_INTERFACE and OUTPUT_INTERFACE and clkhw, that works at 100 MHz and triggers SHIFTREGISTERS, DAUB_LL2_FILTER, HAAR_LL2_FILTER and 1LEV_MLPN_CLASSIFIER. -25-

26 less than 3 in the worst cases. At this point the control switches on the Jump search that, because of its philosophy, is much faster. When activated, Jump search works uninterruptedly up to 17, for the analyzed sequence (Fig. 14.b). 00:21,6 00:21,6 Elapsed Time [mm:ss,s] 00:17,3 00:13,0 00:08,6 00:04,3 Elapsed Time [mm:ss,s] 00:17,3 00:13,0 00:08,6 00:04,3 00:00,0 00:00, Number of triggers Number of triggers (a) (b) Fig. 14. The way in which the system commutates during (a:) the Exhaustive search and (b:) the Jump search. F. HOOK BOLTS DETECTION In order to test the generality of our system in detecting other kinds of bolts, we have focused on the hook bolts. The detection of these bolts was already algorithmically studied and compared with the hexagonal ones in our work [4]. Firstly, a second rail network employing hook bolts (see Fig. 15) and covering about 6 km was acquired. Two training sets TS1 and TS2 were extracted. They contained 421 negative examples, and respectively 172 positive examples of left hook bolts (TS1), and 172 examples of right hook bolts (TS2). Therefore, TS1 and TS2, were used for training the MLPN Classifiers devoted to inspect respectively the left and on the right side of the rail. Finally, the remaining video sequence was used to test the ability of VISyR even in detecting hook bolts. -26-

27 (a) Fig. 15. Sample image patterns of the (a:) right hook bolts and (b:) left hook bolts. (b) During this test, we have found that, VISyR achieves an acceptable rate detection of partially occluded hook bolts (47% and 31% respectively for left and right, Table V), whereas, it was not so affordable in case of occluded hexagonal bolts. This circumstances is justified since the hexagonal shape could cause miss classification because its similarity with the stones on the background. TABLE V ACCURACY (HEXAGONAL BOLTS VS HOOK BOLTS) HEXAGONAL LEFT HOOK RIGHT HOOK Detected visible bolts 99.6% 100% 100% Detected occluded bolts 0.1% 47% 31% Detected absent bolts 95% 100% 100% Moreover, a better behavior in terms of detection of occluded hook bolts even speeds up the velocity. In fact, as shown in Table VI, though the velocities reached during the Jump and the Exhaustive search does not present significant differences with respect those obtained with the hexagonal bolts the system remains (in the case of hook bolts) for longer time intervals in the Jump search, because of the higher detection rate. This leads to a higher global velocity. TABLE VI OBTAINED PERFORMANCE (HEXAGONAL BOLTS VS HOOK BOLTS) HEXAGONAL HOOK Velocity [km/h] [km/h] Jump search computational time 74.3% 93.6% Jump search computational velocity [km/h] [km/h] Exhaustive search computational time 25.7% 6.4% Exhaustive search computational velocity 10.2 [km/h] 10.1 [km/h] VIII. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK This paper has proposed VISyR, a visual system able to autonomously detect the hexagonal -27-

28 headed bolts that secure the rail to the sleepers. Versions of VISyR targeted to detect the absence/presence of other types of fastening bolts employed in railway infrastructures can be straightforwardly derived because of the flexibility of our FPGA-based implementation. In particular, detection of hook bolts have been even tested downloading onto the FPGA different set of neural weights, generated by a proper training step. The implemented prediction algorithm and the FPGA-based architecture allow to speed up the system performance in terms of the inspection velocity: VISyR analyses video at 201 km/h (Jump search) and at 10 km/h (Exhaustive search), reaching a composite velocity of 152 km/h for the tested video sequence covering more than 9 km. If the system remains in the Jump phase for a long time, performance can increase subsequently. Next work will be addressed in this direction, for example, automatically skipping those areas where the fastening elements are covered by asphalt (i.e., level crossing, where Exhaustive search is executed in continuous). Other future works could be addressed as follows: - Our FPGA-based architecture performs the analysis of a window in 8.09 µs, but a significant part of the input phase (6.82 µs, i.e., 84% of the whole interval) cannot be overlapped (pipelined) with any other computation. Future research will deal with this bottleneck, for instance developing the FPGA-architecture on the same board where the frame grabber is located, avoiding the need for PCI input. - As we have seen in Section V, the activation function in MLPNCB is computed in software, because of its high hardware requirement. Nevertheless, a hardware implementation could further improve the performance. At the moment, we are considering the possibility of using a hybrid method which computes the activation -28-

29 function directly (in the interval of its linear behavior) and maps it in LUTs (sub sampling the non-linear interval). However, VISyR constitutes a significant aid to the personnel in the railway safety issue because of its high reliability, robustness and accuracy (99.6% visible bolts and 95% absent bolts correctly detected). Moreover, its computing performance allows a more frequent maintenance of the entire railway network. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors acknowledge Achille Montanaro, Altera Corporation, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments which have improved this work. The authors would also like to thank Gianluigi and Pasquale De Ruvo for running simulations on Quartus II. REFERENCES [1] A. Distante, F. Marino, P.L. Mazzeo, M. Nitti and E. Stella, Metodo e Sistema Automatico di Ispezione Visuale di una Infrastruttura, (in Italian) Italian Industrial Patent N. RM2005A000381, owned by the Italian National Research Council, [2] F. Marino, et al. A Real Time Visual Inspection System for Railway Maintenance: Automatic Rail Detection and Tracking, Internal Report DEE - Politecnico di Bari, [3] E. Stella, P.L. Mazzeo, M. Nitti, G. Cicirelli, A. Distante and T. D Orazio, Visual recognition of missing fastening elements for railroad maintenance, IEEE-ITSC International Conference on Intelligent Transportation System, pp , Singapore, [4] P.L. Mazzeo, M. Nitti, E. Stella and A. Distante, Visual recognition of fastening bolts for railroad maintenance, Pattern Recognition Letters, vol. 25 n. 6, pp , [5] C. Alippi, E. Casagrande, F. Scotti, and V. Piuri, Composite Real-Time Image Processing for Railways Track Profile Measurement, IEEE Trans. Instrumentation and Measurement, vol. 49, N. 3, pp , June

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