In this project, a railway track ballast is scanned, and the outputting 3D mesh is used to determine some information used in later analysis.

3D scanning is done using a RGBD camera. The localization is done using image processing, and then is combined with the IMU data.

The analysis includes computing bounding box, area and volume of the ballast, which are very important parameters in railway engineering analysis.

The most important point about this project, is the speedup gained using this method, comparing to old methods currently used in labs. The scan and analysis can be done on about 2 ballasts per minute, so it’s much much faster than calculating these info the old way using caliper.