Our vision is of a more efficient railway of the future that integrates modern technologies with acceptable track inspection practices. Automated track inspection technologies form the core of this vision, allowing infrastructure operators to assess the quality of their track accurately, cost-effectively and without compromising on track safety and capacity. Such inspection has to be regular, provide results in a timely manner and must relate analysis to what can be verified on the ground. In our vision, automated track inspection is a tool to effectively manage human resources for track walking or maintenance, and must produce business benefits through predictive maintenance. We recognise that no single technology is perfect, however, their combined effective use we can significantly improve our understanding of track quality and make our railways safer to run with more capacity. Visual track inspection technologies are the latest means of performing diagnostics on rail infrastructure not possible with other methods which have become possible to realise on large networks as our technological understanding of image understanding has significantly improved over time, and large-scan data processing computer hardware has become a reality. Rail Vision sees such technologies playing an equal or greater role in track understanding compared with some of the other established technologies such as ultrasonics.

Automated visual track inspection is a core technology for understanding track condition and planning maintenance

Walking the track for finding poor track is niether cost effective nor logistically feasible for large networks. Over the last decade, visual archives of track images have been collected to help support such track walking regimes. Rail Vision provides completely automated track inspection solution making it possible to improve manual track inspection by fixing problems where they are, rather than looking for them. Automated techniques are consistent, reliable, and provide cost-effective solution to track inspection.

Track geometry and profiling systems need to be cost effective, easy to operate, portable and provide high quality measurements

Traditionally, geometry and profiling systems have tended to be expensive, difficult to switch from one inspection vehicle to another, and yield data in properietary formats that difficult to integrate with other inspection schemes. Rail Vision's TrackVue unit is a single integrated unit that can be used for making visual, geometry and rail profile measurements. The overall system is easy to operate, portable and uses the latest sensors and cameras to make high quality measurements.

Innovative solutions need technological innovations combined with domain knowledge

Railway tracks are a marvel of engineering. Their layout follows set rules and regulations, and in most countries there are fixed set of layout patterns for switches, check rails, etc. and well-defined track components. Rail Vision works closely with rail infrastructure operators with a view to developing unique and innovative measurements solutions based on this domain knowledge which is combined with our expertise on automated image understand and data processing.