Robust Line-Scan Image Registration via Disparity Estimation for Train Fault Diagnosis

Automatic fault detection based on machine vision technology is crucial for the operational safety of trains. However, when imaging moving trains, system errors may induce localized geometric distortions in the captured images, altering the shapes of critical train components. This, in turn, undermines the precision of subsequent diagnostic algorithms. Therefore, image registration prior to anomaly detection is essential. To address this need, we redefine the horizontal registration of line-scan images as a disparity estimation problem on rectified stereo pairs, which is solved using a proposed dense matching network. The disparity is iteratively refined through a GRU-based update module that constructs a multi-scale cost volume with positional encoding and self-attention. To overcome the absence of real-world disparity ground truth, we generate a physics-based simulation dataset by analytically modeling the nonlinear relationship between train velocity variations and line-scan image distortions. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world train image datasets under varied operational conditions demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms alternatives, achieving 5.8% higher registration accuracy and a fourfold increase in processing speed over state-of-the-art approaches. This advantage is particularly evident in challenging scenarios involving repetitive patterns or texture-less regions.