Machine vision awards

The CKR Automatic Vision Inspection System has won the 2003 Advanced Imaging Award in the Machine Vision category. This is an annual US Imaging award.

The application was for the automatic inspection of rail coal trucks running from Leigh Creek to Port Augusta in South Australia. These trains can be up to 3 km long with each truck carrying 75 tonnes of coal. If the coal is released en-route the probability of derailment is high and costly.

In the year prior to the inspection systems being employed, the cost of derailments was in excess of $6 million. There have been no derailments since vision inspection has been in use.

Cameras were employed to view and measure the position of door levers that, when exceeding a 'safe zone', will output alarms to the train driver and rail control.

The program was set for both day and night operations. The tolerance allowed was 0 to 10 mm spaces to pass - any larger space would result in a fail signal output. This allowed for a safety margin between 10 and 15 mm. The camera triggering was achieved from proximity sensors positioned at the rails with corresponding inter-bogey distances with train speed approximately 20 kph. An unexpected by-product of this inspection system has also detected the reduction of wheel radius to wear and also the potential for detecting worn brake shoes.