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Hot boxes, which refer to overheated rail-road car wheels and bearings, pose a significant threat to railway operations. Failure to detect and address hot boxes promptly can lead to catastrophic accidents such as derailments and fires. Current way-side hot box detectors operate on the principle that an axle bearing will emit a large amount of heat when it is close to failing. They require principally an infrared (IR) sensor mounted at specific locations along the track, and a signal source coming from a wayside detectors or track circuits to detect if a train is approaching. The IR sensors scanning location, however, should be carefully selected to avoid under/over predicting the operating temperature of the axle bearings and wheels. The dependency of a signal source to activate the system may be problematic as well, not to mention its implementation and maintenance costs. The main contribution of this paper lies with the development of an automatic hot box detection, tracking and counting method by only using the IR cameras. The method combines the YOLO algorithm with the Kalman filter as a tracker. The method was tested with original datasets built with IR images taken from two wayside camera models, cooled and uncooled cameras. The experiments have been conducted on both freight and passenger trains at different times of the day, under clear weather conditions. Apart from the promising results obtained by YOLO, it is found that the Kalman filter further improves the tracking and thus the detection performance, minimizing thereby the incorrect detection or missed detection.
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