Braking behavior as well as life cycle of a railway brake system depends on the quality of the used brake pads. These qualities are evaluated today in a lot of experiments and a classification (good / bad) is mainly done by the know-how of the railway engineers.This work presents an image processing approach for classification of railway brake pads. It is based on the processing of thermal images monitored during a brake application. The work can be divided into two parts: In the first part the performance of different classical differential filters is evaluated to show, which one could give...