A new rail crack detection method using LSTM network for actual application based on AE technology

Abstract In order to use acoustic emission (AE) technology in the actual application of rail crack detection, an important problem to be solved is how to overcome the noise interference of wheel-rail contact movement. In this paper, a new method is proposed to eliminate noise interference and detect rail crack signal based on AE technology, which has a two-level structure with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network. At the first level, an improved noise model from multiple kinds of noise signals is built by the LSTM network. This model is used to eliminate the known noise signals. At the second level, the model of crack signal is built to remove the unknown noise interference from the denoised signal of the first level. Based on the proposed two-level structure, the crack signals can be detected. All the AE signals are acquired from the real noise environment of railway. Meanwhile, the detection ability of the proposed method is analyzed and verified. The results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective to detect crack signals in actual application. It can provide a useful guidance for AE detection of rail cracks.