MACHINE VISION FOR AUTOMATICVISUAL INSPECTION OF WOODENRAILWAY SLEEPERS USING UNSUPERVISED NEURAL NETWORKS

The motivation for this thesis work is the need for improving reliability of equipment and quality of service to railway passengers as well as a requirement for cost-effective and efficient condition maintenance management for rail transportation. This thesis work develops a fusion of various machine vision analysis methods to achieve high performance in automation of wooden rail track inspection.The condition monitoring in rail transport is done manually by a human operator where people rely on inference systems and assumptions to develop conclusions. The use of conditional monitoring allows maintenance to be scheduled, or other actions to be taken to avoid the consequences of failure, before the failure occurs. Manual or automated condition monitoring of materials in fields of public transportation like railway, aerial navigation, traffic safety, etc, where safety is of prior importance needs non-destructive testing (NDT).In general, wooden railway sleeper inspection is done manually by a human operator, by moving along the rail sleeper and gathering information by visual and sound analysis for examining the presence of cracks. Human inspectors working on lines visually inspect wooden rails to judge the quality of rail sleeper. In this project work the machine vision system is developed based on the manual visual analysis system, which uses digital cameras and image processing software to perform similar manual inspections. As the manual inspection requires much effort and is expected to be error prone sometimes and also appears difficult to discriminate even for a human operator by the frequent changes in inspected material. The machine vision system developed classifies the condition of material by examining individual pixels of images, processing them and attempting to develop conclusions with the assistance of knowledge bases and features.A pattern recognition approach is developed based on the methodological knowledge from manual procedure. The pattern recognition approach for this thesis work was developed and achieved by a non destructive testing method to identify the flaws in manually done condition monitoring of sleepers.In this method, a test vehicle is designed to capture sleeper images similar to visual inspection by human operator and the raw data for pattern recognition approach is provided from the captured images of the wooden sleepers. The data from the NDT method were further processed and appropriate features were extracted.The collection of data by the NDT method is to achieve high accuracy in reliable classification results. A key idea is to use the non supervised classifier based on the features extracted from the method to discriminate the condition of wooden sleepers in to either good or bad. Self organising map is used as classifier for the wooden sleeper classification.In order to achieve greater integration, the data collected by the machine vision system was made to interface with one another by a strategy called fusion. Data fusion was looked in at two different levels namely sensor-level fusion, feature- level fusion. As the goal was to reduce the accuracy of the human error on the rail sleeper classification as good or bad the results obtained by the feature-level fusion compared to that of the results of actual classification were satisfactory.

ANALYSIS & STUDY OF AI TECHNIQUES FORAUTOMATIC CONDITION MONITORING OFRAILWAY TRACK INFRASTRUCTURE : Artificial Intelligence Techniques

Since the last decade the problem of surface inspection has been receiving great attention from the scientific community, the quality control and the maintenance of products are key points in several industrial applications.The railway associations spent much money to check the railway infrastructure. The railway infrastructure is a particular field in which the periodical surface inspection can help the operator to prevent critical situations. The maintenance and monitoring of this infrastructure is an important aspect for railway association.That is why the surface inspection of railway also makes importance to the railroad authority to investigate track components, identify problems and finding out the way that how to solve these problems. In railway industry, usually the problems find in railway sleepers, overhead, fastener, rail head, switching and crossing and in ballast section as well. In this thesis work, I have reviewed some research papers based on AI techniques together with NDT techniques which are able to collect data from the test object without making any damage. The research works which I have reviewed and demonstrated that by adopting the AI based system, it is almost possible to solve all the problems and this system is very much reliable and efficient for diagnose problems of this transportation domain. I have reviewed solutions provided by different companies based on AI techniques, their products and reviewed some white papers provided by some of those companies. AI based techniques likemachine vision, stereo vision, laser based techniques and neural network are used in most cases to solve the problems which are performed by the railway engineers.The problems in railway handled by the AI based techniques performed by NDT approach which is a very broad, interdisciplinary field that plays a critical role in assuring that structural components and systems perform their function in a reliable and cost effective fashion. The NDT approach ensures the uniformity, quality and serviceability of materials without causing any damage of that materials is being tested. This testing methods use some way to test product like, Visual and Optical testing, Radiography, Magnetic particle testing, Ultrasonic testing, Penetrate testing, electro mechanic testing and acoustic emission testing etc. The inspection procedure has done periodically because of better maintenance. This inspection procedure done by the railway engineers manually with the aid of AI based techniques.The main idea of thesis work is to demonstrate how the problems can be reduced of thistransportation area based on the works done by different researchers and companies. And I have also provided some ideas and comments according to those works and trying to provide some proposal to use better inspection method where it is needed.The scope of this thesis work is automatic interpretation of data from NDT, with the goal of detecting flaws accurately and efficiently. AI techniques such as neural networks, machine vision, knowledge-based systems and fuzzy logic were applied to a wide spectrum of problems in this area. Another scope is to provide an insight into possible research methods concerning railway sleeper, fastener, ballast and overhead inspection by automatic interpretation of data.In this thesis work, I have discussed about problems which are arise in railway sleepers,fastener, and overhead and ballasted track. For this reason I have reviewed some research papers related with these areas and demonstrated how their systems works and the results of those systems. After all the demonstrations were taking place of the advantages of using AI techniques in contrast with those manual systems exist previously.This work aims to summarize the findings of a large number of research papers deploying artificial intelligence (AI) techniques for the automatic interpretation of data from nondestructive testing (NDT). Problems in rail transport domain are mainly discussed in this work. The overall work of this paper goes to the inspection of railway sleepers, fastener, ballast and overhead.

Vikten av säkra nätverk

The purpose of this thesis is to show how to use vulnerability testing to identify and search for security flaws in networks of computers. The goal is partly to give a casual description of different types of methods of vulnerability testing and partly to present the method and results from a vulnerability test. A document containing the results of the vulnerability test will be handed over and a solution to the found high risk vulnerabilities. The goal is also to carry out and present this work as a form of a scholarly work.The problem was to show how to perform vulnerability tests and identify vulnerabilities in the organization's network and systems. Programs would be run under controlled circumstances in a way that they did not burden the network. Vulnerability tests were conducted sequentially, when data from the survey was needed to continue the scan.A survey of the network was done and data in the form of operating system, among other things, were collected in the tables. A number of systems were selected from the tables and were scanned with Nessus. The result was a table across the network and a table of found vulnerabilities. The table of vulnerabilities has helped the organization to prevent these vulnerabilities by updating the affected computers. Also a wireless network with WEP encryption, which is insecure, has been detected and decrypted.

”Vi gör så gott vi kan” : Vårdpersonals upplevelser av amningsstöd till gravida ochnyblivna föräldrar

Amning, amningskomplikationer, stöd och råd vid amning är en del av den sexuella och reproduktiva hälsan och ingår i barnmorskans kompetensområde.Det finns mycket forskning som beskriver nyblivna föräldrars upplevelse av amningsstöd men inte lika mycket forskning på hur vårdpersonalen upplever amningsstödet som ges till gravida och nyblivna föräldrar. Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka vårdpersonals upplevelser av amningsstöd till gravida och nyblivna föräldrar.Studien utfördes genom en kvalitativ metod utifrån en induktiv ansats. Data hämtades från intervjuer med semistrukturerade frågor i 11 fokusgrupper. All data bearbetades genom kvalitativ, induktiv innehållsanalys.Resultatet i studien visade att vårdpersonal upplever amningsstödet de ger som en viktig del i deras arbete. Amningsstödet hade brister och en betydande brist uppgavs vara kontinuiteten av amningsstöd genom hela vårdkedjan.Informanterna ansåg att amningsstödet borde förbättras och många förslag nämndes för att främja amningen hos nyblivna föräldrar och barn.Denna studie kan öka medvetenheten av den egna och kollegornas upplevelse av amningsstöd vilket kan leda till ett bättre samarbete mellan enheterna och en bättre kommunikation samt förändringar i organisationen som gynnar och främjar amningen.

Jämförelse av två system för att bedöma vinter väglag : Ett nytt system i utvecklingen för att säkra Sveriges vägar

Trafikverket, är den statliga verksamhet som har hand om alla Sveriges vägar och järnvägar har den så kallade nollvisionen som ett huvudmål. Tanken bakom nollvisionen är att de som använder vägarna skall vara säkra och inte komma till skada. En del av uppfyllandet av detta mål är att Trafikverket ger ut korttidsprognoser för väglag och körförhållande. I nuläget så används ett mycket manuellt systemet som heter NTIS, men man håller på att utveckla det nya automatiska systemet RCC som skall kunna ta fram korttidsprognoser baserat på olika former av data, t.ex. data från väderstationer. Syftet med denna studie är att utvärdera hur väl de två olika systemen utför en korttidsprognos och jämföra de mot varandra, samt verkligheten. Denna studie gjordes i form av en förklarande fallstudie. Som datainsamling används dokument i olika former och analysen var kvantitativ då resultatet av utvärdering ger olika procenttal av hur rätt respektive system har. Under undersökningen gång så kom vi fram till att båda systemen hade sina fördelar och nackdelar. T.ex. så det gamla NTIS systemet fortfarande bäst på isigt och moddigt väglag. Medans det nya RCC systemet hade sina egna fördelar, t.ex. snöigt väglag och vått väglag. Samt så hade RCC en klar fördel med sin rapporteringstid, vilket var ett problem man såg med NTIS. Resultat var som sagt ett procenttal av hur rätt de två olika systemen hade, men även förslag till förbättringar. T.ex. hur man skulle kunna ändra RCC regler för bättre resultat.

Projektarbete i praktiken : Hur kan oförutsedda problem vid projektöverlämningen minimeras

Projektarbete förekommer på många företag och trots att det ofta finns tydligt beskrivna rutiner för hur projektarbetet skall ske händer det att parterna inte är helt överens då projektet ska avslutas. Ibland är det ändringar under projektets gång som ligger till grund för kommande tvister, men i grunden är det oftast kommunikationen som brister mellan parterna. Genom att intervjua några olika företag och analyserat hur de arbetar i projekt har vi i detta arbete kunnat se en röd tråd som består av den viktiga kommunikationen för att skapa och bibehålla sunda relationer. För att hantera de förändringar som kan ske under projektresans gång ser vi i vår analys av de företag som ingått i vår studie att det är av fördel att ha ett nära samarbete med kunder eller leverantörer och helst starta samarbetet tidigt för att möjliggöra justeringar som annars i ett senare skede blir svårare att genomföra. Ett tillvägagångssätt att arbeta med ett projekts interna problem kan vara plattformar som möjliggör en delning av information mellan projektets olika medlemmar. Angreppsvinkeln är då att det ska bli lättare för att samtliga projektdeltagare att kunna ta del av informationen med en förhoppning att minimera missförstånd inom projektet.