Detection of Track Bed Defects Based on Fibre Optic Sensor Signals and an Improved Hidden Markov Model

Abstract

Railway track bed defects affect the normal operation of trains and pose great safety risks. In order to detect such issues early, we developed a railway track bed defect detection method which uses optical fibre sensors and an improved HMM (hidden Markov model) to detect the signals collected by a DAS (distributed acoustic sensing) system. First, by analysing the physical process of train operation and determining the number of hidden states, a waveform segmentation method based on average amplitude was used to solve the problem of unequal signal lengths. Second, an adaptive power spectrum energy ratio calculation method was employed to extract track fault features, a set of which was constructed by combining various quantity features. Then, normal and abnormal models were trained according to the sensor measurement area. Finally, the probability of detecting the signal with each model was compared to determine whether the signal was abnormal. Experiments were conducted to compare the applicability of the waveform segmentation method and the feature extraction method. The results show that the HMM based on both waveform segmentation and track bed defect feature sets had the highest recognition rate, the lowest number of false detection areas, and a greater impact on the signal in the early development stage of track bed defects. The proposed method, therefore, has strong recognition ability, which makes it suitable for track bed defect detection.