A Deep Learning-Based Method for Overhead Contact System Component Recognition Using Mobile 2D LiDAR

The overhead contact system (OCS) is a critical railway infrastructure for train power supply. Periodic inspections, aiming at acquiring the operational condition of the OCS and detecting problems, are necessary to guarantee the safety of railway operations. One of the OCS inspection means is to analyze data of point clouds collected by mobile 2D LiDAR. Recognizing OCS components from the collected point clouds is a critical task of the data analysis. However, the complex composition of OCS makes the task difficult. To solve the problem of recognizing multiple OCS components, we propose a new deep learning-based method to conduct semantic segmentation on the point cloud collected by mobile 2D LiDAR. Both online data processing and batch data processing are supported because our method is designed to classify points into meaningful categories of objects scan line by scan line. Local features are important for the success of point cloud semantic segmentation. Thus, we design an iterative point partitioning algorithm and a module named as Spatial Fusion Network, which are two critical components of our method for multi-scale local feature extraction. We evaluate our method on point clouds where sixteen categories of common OCS components have been manually labeled. Experimental results show that our method is effective in multiple object recognition since mean Intersection-over-Unions (mIoUs) of online data processing and batch data processing are, respectively, 96.12% and 97.17%.