1D CNN Based Detection and Localisation of Defective Droppers in Railway Catenary

Defective droppers pose a significant threat to the performance of the contact between the train pantograph and railway catenary. In this paper, the impact of damaged droppers on the performance of pantograph–catenary interaction behaviour is analysed, and the impact of varying degrees of damage to each dropper is labelled. To improve the classification accuracy when both the damage degree and position are considered, a model integrating multiple 1D CNNs is proposed. Approaches including randomly searching the optimal hyper-parameters and K-fold cross-validation are used to prevent overfitting and to ensure model performance regardless of the training data subset selected. Compared with a conventional 1D CNN, the classification performance of the integrated method is demonstrated using the metrics accuracy, F1-score, precision and recall. It is concluded that, through the use of the integrated 1D CNN, damaged droppers can be detected and localised based on the pantograph–catenary contact force. Hence, intelligent catenary inspection can be enhanced.