Attempts at Automatic Detection of Railway Head Edges from Images and Laser Data

The more and more high resolution of aerial and ground images, as well as high density of laser data cause that they are more and more widely applied in many engineering projects. Given the current technical parameters, it is also possible to map railway infrastructure not only from the ground level but also from airborne locations (photogrammetry, laser scanning). Testing the usefulness of those data in obtaining information about railway infrastructure, and in particular, in detecting rail heads has been a subject of research of this paper authors. The paper presents results of experiments, consisting in verification of existing solutions and testing own algorithms for an automatic extraction of railway rail heads. The tested algorithms of object detecting and locating produced preliminary, satisfying results. The authors believe it to be reasonable to continue their research work.