Towards Condition-Based Maintenance of Catenary wires using computer vision : Deep Learning applications on eMaintenance & Industrial AI for railway industry

Sammanfattning: Railways are a main element of a sustainable transport policy in several countries as they are considered a safe, efficient and green mode of transportation. Owing to these advantages, there is a cumulative request for the railway industry to increase the performance, the capacity and the availability in addition to safely transport goods and people at higher speeds. To meet the demand, large adjustment of the infrastructure and improvement of maintenance process are required.  Inspection activities are essential in establishing the required maintenance, and it is periodically required to reduce unexpected failures and to prevent dangerous consequences.  Maintenance of railway catenary systems is a critical task for warranting the safety of electrical railway operation.Usually, the catenary inspection is performed manually by trained personnel. However, as in all human-based inspections characterized by slowness and lack of objectivity, might have a number of crucial disadvantages and potentially lead to dangerous consequences. With the rapid progress of artificial intelligence, it is appropriate for computer vision detection approaches to replace the traditional manual methods during inspections.  In this thesis, a strategy for monitoring the health of catenary wires is developed, which include the various steps needed to detect anomalies in this component. Moreover, a solution for detecting different types of wires in the railway catenary system was implemented, in which a deep learning framework is developed by combining the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and the Region Proposal Network (RPN).