Research on Railway Obstacle Detection Method Based on Developed Euclidean Clustering

To prevent the problem of safety accidents caused by the intrusion of obstacles into railway clearance, this paper proposes an obstacle detection method based on Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) to obtain and process rich three-dimensional (3D) information and depth information of the railway scene. The method first preprocesses the point cloud of the railway scenario collected by LiDAR to divide a basic area containing the rails. Then, the method divides the roadbed plane and fits the rails with the random sample consensus (RANSAC) algorithm, dividing the detection area according to the position of the rails. To address the issue of over or under-segmentation in the traditional Euclidean clustering method, which is due to sparser point clouds the farther the object is from the LiDAR, this paper improves the conventional Euclidean clustering. It introduces an adaptive distance threshold to categorize obstacles. Finally, compared with traditional Euclidean clustering, K-means clustering, and density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) clustering, the improved Euclidean cluster has achieved better results in terms of computing time and segmentation accuracy. Experimental results show the ability of the method to detect railway obstacles successfully.